


Blues in the Groove

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Moving On, Team Dynamics, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-21
Updated: 2015-03-21
Packaged: 2018-03-18 21:51:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3585333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky Barnes is in from the cold and ready to take the first steps toward resuming his life. He has all of his memories, but Steve isn't the only Avenger eager to have someone around who remembers their past.</p><p>A tale in which there are embarrassing Captain America stories, occasional realizations, swing-dancing SHIELD commanders, missions gone awry, culinary adventures, uncomfortable revelations, trips to Queens, bromances, romances, repeated threats of arson, and the couch is a metaphor.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blues in the Groove

**Author's Note:**

> Featuring art by the talented [Krimsnkrams](http://krimsnkrams.tumblr.com/) ([story art post here](http://krimsnkrams.tumblr.com/post/114226567255/i-participated-in-the-buckynat-minibang-at))

He'd turned up on Steve's figurative doorstep a few months after the fight on the Helicarrier. He'd weighted the risks and deemed it safe enough. HYDRA wasn't yet in a position to try to reclaim their lost asset and Steve had been the only one looking -- there had been nothing about the Winter Soldier (or James Barnes) in the files the Black Widow had dumped on to the internet.

"I was too much of a secret," he explained to Maria Hill and the Black Widow during one of the 'debriefing' sessions. His presence in Steve's life -- as opposed to the shadow of his absence -- meant running the gauntlet of Steve's friends and allies and proving his intentions and possibly his worth. It meant thorough interrogations by SHIELD's best spies, it meant letting Howard's kid look at his arm, it meant agreeing to see a counselor trained in POW rehabilitation. It meant being asked point-blank if he'd shown up to kill Steve and being expected to answer. Steve had protested the last, but not the rest and Bucky had gone along with it, reluctantly at first, but with growing... not enthusiasm, but at least respect for the necessity of it all. He'd made harder choices.

"I wasn't some prized weapon to be put on display to show the superiority of HYDRA. I wasn't in the general pool of assets anyone could requisition if they had enough clearance. I worked for Pierce, under his direct command. Nobody needed to know about me and, considering who I turned out to really be, it was better for everyone that nobody did."

Who he turned out to really be was still a work in progress, but who he had been was maybe something none of Steve's Avengers expected. They seemed to think he'd been some kind of robot assassin, an unthinking killing machine defrosted to commit mayhem and then put away like a tool in a drawer. And from the outside, maybe, that's what it had seemed like as he told them of how he'd been used, first by HYDRA and then by Department X (after the Soviets took possession of his cryo tank in '45) and then by HYDRA again after the collapse of communism led to a KGB fire sale and his acquisition by Pierce. They thought that what he hadn't done -- live a normal life -- mattered more than what he had.

His shrink thought he should give a lot more weight to those outside opinions than he did, that their perspectives had a validity despite their distance and his own immediacy did not make him a more reliable witness to events. And he would grudgingly admit that maybe this was true, but try telling that to his memories. Because from the inside, it had been a very different story. He'd never felt like a robot, like a sub-human being, or like a slave. He had never felt _powerless_. Quite the opposite: he'd been very aware of his own power, of his own prowess, and of his accomplishments as an indirect hand on the tiller of history. He had been praised by his superiors and respected as a warrior by his colleagues -- and he had had colleagues, if not necessarily friends, within both Department X and HYDRA.

"My handlers at Department X used to sometimes reward me for a successful mission with a bottle of export-quality vodka and a girl," he explained when Hill wouldn't buy that he'd been treated like a person and not a possession, at least by the Soviets. It had been a harder life under Pierce, a crueler one, but not remarkably so for someone used to submission to absolute authority. The Soviets had done their best to destroy him, too, when he'd become more than they could comfortably handle. "HYDRA didn't spring for hookers, but I still got good meals when I was out of the tank. I got books. I had a Walkman for a while, even. I had Def Leppard tapes."

Hill's face was a memorable study of someone caught between horror and amusement and opting for both. "You didn't notice you weren't like all the other boys?"

"Of course I noticed," he replied, then smiled. "I'm gonna guess you didn't get Steve a girl or a bottle of something strong enough to take the edge off when you defrosted him in 2011, but I'd bet my shiny metal arm on you treating him like a very special boy, too. Because that's what we were, the last super-soldiers. And Alexander Pierce was supervising both our care."

Hill was about to protest, but stopped herself. Fury might've had the hands-on running of Steve, but Pierce had been involved. Bucky _knew_ he'd been involved, even if he hadn't yet understood his own connection to Captain America or Steve Rogers. And Hill, as Fury's deputy, would have known it, too.

"You're looking at it the wrong way," he went on before Hill could try to follow up on what really didn't matter. "I knew that I wasn't my own man, but nobody else around me was, either. You think 'personal satisfaction' mattered in Soviet Russia? Nobody else got to decide anything about their lives -- where they lived, where they worked, any of it. And then with HYDRA, nobody _wanted_ to -- they were there to serve and happy to die doing so. I wasn't the outlier you think I was."

In Department X, it had led to an almost-camaraderie, a kind of acknowledgement that they were all stuck in this shit together, and if he hadn't realized how much worse his shit was, the others had probably seen it as a blessing of ignorance. With Pierce and HYDRA, there'd been a cult-like devotion to duty that had embraced pain and suffering, their own and anyone else's. With HYDRA, _everyone_ was a tool to be used.

"You were the only one missing time," Hill pointed out. "You were the only one without a name."

"I knew my title," he said after a moment's pause to organize his thoughts because this was important to get right the first time. "Department X called me the Winter Soldier and that's who I was because I'd earned it. That made it mine in a way some assigned name wouldn't have been. I could have been Mikhail or Sergei or Oleg because they'd felt like it, or I could have a name I'd had some hand in choosing when I had very little chance to choose anything in my life. Isn't that right, _Black Widow_?"

Natalia Alianovna Romanova, not born to the name, gave him a ghost of a smile, but he could see the greater reaction in her eyes. Hill led the interrogations, but it had been clear that the Widow and others had contributed to the questions. She usually hid her reactions to his answers better than Hill did, but not well enough that her interest in his Soviet history went unnoticed. And from that he realized that she remembered less of her own time there than she pretended to and asking him was the closest she could come to getting her own answers. They weren't the right questions, not if she were looking for her own history, but those wouldn't come through Hill and maybe not at all.

"As for the rest," he went on, returning his attention to Hill, point made. "I had been told I'd volunteered after getting wounded at the front. I had no memories to say otherwise and a metal arm to prove that I'd been in the war like they'd said. They told me the cryo was part of the process, something I needed to stay alive until they could stabilize the serum. I knew I was missing time, lots of it, but they told me the alternative was a painful death worse than anything our enemies could inflict. When I woke up in Pierce's custody, he told me the same thing. And I believed him, too."

He'd believed a lot of what Pierce had told him because Pierce, unlike his Department X masters, had wanted him to believe in his own actions. The Soviets had simply told him what to do and expected it done, knowing the fear of a punishment for failure would shore up any lack of resolve. Pierce, on the other hand, spoke to him of honor and duty, of obligation to a greater good and the need to leave the world a better place than they'd found it. He'd appealed to the Winter Soldier's ego as well as his conscience and the Winter Soldier had been human enough to respond to it and to fear disappointing Pierce more than any physical punishment.

(The wipes had been a behavioral corrective, not a punishment for failure. Pierce hadn't been very interested in corporal punishment for a failed mission, of which there'd been very few, and nobody else had had either the authority or the balls to do what Pierce wouldn't.)

It had all gone pear-shaped once Steve had entered the picture, of course, and, now that he had his own mind back, Bucky honestly wondered what Pierce had been thinking in sending the Winter Soldier after Captain America and who he had misjudged worse: Steve Rogers or the ghost of Bucky Barnes?

"Vienna, 1985," Hill began and Bucky shook his head to clear his thoughts at the abrupt change in topic. This was how the questioning sessions worked, how it had gone on since the beginning: sometimes moving linearly and sometimes jumping back and forth to test him for inconsistencies or to see if he remembered more. They didn't understand that his memory was fine, perfectly intact from his childhood to the present. He'd gotten everything back on the day Steve had pulled his stunt on the Helicarrier, although not initially in the proper order. It was the context for those memories that was still all fucked up.

"Gerhard Stohlmann and family," he supplied, voice even despite his gorge rising from being almost able to smell the blood from slitting the throats of the parents and two small children; he'd smothered the baby in her cradle. "Wife's brother was in the DDR Foreign Ministry, passed on details of how bad things were in Moscow to his brother-in-law, who in turn was handing them over to the BfV. The family annihilation was ordered as a show of reach and force. Moscow wanted it done in-house because they were pissed off at Honecker's people for not realizing what was going on."

He'd spent decades accepting that he'd had to do terrible things for a good cause, that he'd killed the guilty and the innocent alike for a greater plan, the latter unfortunate collateral damage in the fight for a more peaceful future. But that turned out not to be the case, of course. And the thing of it was, when he took away everything the Winter Soldier had done, he was still left with Sergeant James Barnes, who'd had blood on his hands long before he'd fallen into the hands of his enemies.

His shrink told him that his eagerness to accept guilt for what he'd done was not responsibility but it's opposite. He was avoiding facing his own history of powerlessness and victimization. It was easier for him to accept blame than to accept the horrible things that had been done to him. And that, Doctor Sahni insisted, extended back before the Winter Soldier. ("You acted under compulsion during the war, albeit a far more benign compulsion. You were ordered to kill and the lawfulness, the necessity, of those killings doesn't change the fact that you were asked to end lives and that changes a man.")

He might be rejecting his own victimhood, he'd told Sahni -- and Steve and Hill and anyone else who pressed the matter -- but it was how he had to do it to be able to function. How was anyone supposed to live with what had been done to him? How was he supposed to just _accept_ and move on past a violation of such depth and duration? He wasn't pretending it hadn't happened, but he wasn't ready to dwell on it, either. Hill pushed too hard sometimes with the questions about the physical and procedural details and he never thought it was an accident, but he'd shut down more than he lashed out. It was easier to talk about the lives he'd taken than his own.

Today, at least, Hill stopped before it got to be too much and ended the session with a question about Steve, a story about their life before that Steve had sworn was true but nobody had quite believed.

"I don't remember the dog's name, but yeah," Bucky confirmed, curious why it had come up. It had been some kind of little poodle and, like all little dogs, had been mean and eager to bite and had only obeyed commands in Finnish because that's what Mrs. Rasanen had spoken to it. "Damned thing used to chase Steve down the block until he picked up a few commands. Except he never really knew what he was saying, so flash forward fifteen years and Captain America thinks he's telling the Finnish Army to sit, but he's actually telling them to roll over. You should have _seen_ their faces."

On that high note, he was free to go and go he did, out into the cold. He was living with Steve for now, but being at Stark Tower made him uncomfortable even when he wasn't sitting in a room answering questions about the Winter Soldier. It was a target for bad guys and tourists and paparazzi and the first place HYDRA would look for him to turn up when they finally decided to do so. Also, and this had been a slower realization, it wasn't good for him and Steve. They got on fine, if still a little tentatively, messed up to different degrees by different things but still fundamentally compatible as friends. But both professional and amateur shrinks had told the both of them that they needed to figure out who they were in the present and they needed to do so without defining themselves in relation to the other and spending so much time in each other's space wasn't helping.

Which was why Bucky had used a tiny bit of the insane amount of money Hill had given him ("back pay adjusted for inflation and reparations, don't argue") to buy an apartment in Jackson Heights' historical district. He'd picked the neighborhood on something of a lark -- he and Steve had gone out to try Tibetan food and had wound up spending half an afternoon wandering around because, away from the train, it was very pretty and Steve was still a sucker for architecture. Jackson Heights was very _New York_ in ways that were comfortable to both the man Bucky had once been and the man he was now: it was bustling, full of immigrants, and it even had an elevated train rattling overhead on Roosevelt Avenue, but the immigrants were from Southeast Asia and the Himalayas and the languages he heard in the street weren't the ones he'd heard either in Brooklyn or any of the places the Winter Soldier had been. It was a mixture of working and middle class and Bucky felt he could breathe more easily there than in the rarefied air of Stark Tower, where nobody did their own housework or grocery shopping and everyone was still wary of him.

He'd had been deemed safe by the other Avengers and possibly even friendly and they had started making the occasional social approach for his sake as opposed to Steve's. But that didn't mean that they were completely comfortable around him, just instead that their discomfort tended to stem from what had been done to him instead of what he might do. He wasn't interested in either their pity or catering to their sensitivities and suspected all parties involved were happy that he was moving out and more than willing to help him navigate the rough seas of furnishing a first apartment when you were ninety-seven going on thirty-two.

(Roughly. He had no idea how old he was biologically, not when the serum had slowed his aging and he could only estimate how long he'd been 'awake' during the seventy years of his captivity -- closer to ten years than five, maybe as much as twelve but probably less than fifteen. Steve's timeline was straightforward, however, and for many reasons it was easier to peg his own age to sixteen months older than him, same as ever.)

He walked to the West Elm by Columbus Circle to look at coffee tables and couches because Steve, who enjoyed the idea of Bucky furnishing an apartment much more than Bucky did, had done research. An hour and a half later, he was walking back downtown exhausted and frustrated and without a couch. He'd liked mattress shopping much more, at least past his initial panic attack at the full-body sensor that was supposed to determine what kind of mattress he liked. He liked them soft, apparently, and had picked out a ridiculous one that came with enough padding on the top that he'd sunk in like quicksand and Steve, on the bed next to him, had burst out laughing at his blissful expression.

"If you want a sleeper sofa, you are picking it out," he informed Steve upon his return. "Maybe I'll just get another bed and put it in the living room."

Steve looked up from where he was taking notes on paper from something on his tablet. "You'll find your dream couch," he assured in the same tone Bucky used to use to comfort Steve after another date gone awry. "You just have to be patient. In the meanwhile, are you up for a little bit of mayhem?"

Bucky crossed the room to where Steve was at the dining room table. "Depends."

As a general rule, he was not up for mayhem. He liked the idea of taking down HYDRA, liked the idea of visiting the sort of pain and suffering upon his torturers that had been inflicted upon him, at least in theory. In practice, he didn't like it much at all because it kept the Winter Soldier too close to the surface of his skin. And because it reminded him that some of what was screwed up about him had pre-dated his fall from the train. (His shrink had Thoughts about why he rarely counted his first HYDRA captivity as an impetus for personality changes even when he allowed that the second had altered him on a fundamental level.) The people who'd caused him the most pain were mostly dead, some for decades and the rest for the last six months, and going after strangers just felt too much like what he'd once had to do. He did not, it turned out, need to see his revenge carried out personally.

Steve, on the other hand, did and Bucky knew him too well to try to talk him out of it. Steve had always been quick to anger, eager to lash out when provoked, and telling him not to was just a waste of breath. Steve wasn't a hothead in the getting-into-barfights sense, although there'd been a couple of those back in the day, but he expected so much from himself and then the world and he handled disappointment badly. It had gotten much worse in the future-present, some of it to do with what had happened to Bucky and most of it not, and it was one more reason that they needed time and space apart. Bucky couldn't keep up with Steve as well as he used to, didn't have the reserves of energy to keep Steve contained once he'd wound himself up, especially when it was sometimes his own presence that was the provocation.

"It's hopefully more blowing-shit-up and less shooting," Steve said as Bucky leaned over his shoulder to look at the map, which was was on the tablet, and then his notebook. "But I'm planning on the shooting happening anyway."

There was a base in northeast Venezuela that could be many things, but from the satellite imagery Steve showed him was probably a HYDRA facility. There weren't a lot of cars or people, but the energy map said that the buildings were drawing far more power than a compound full of corrugated aluminum warehouses should be.

"Tony's hoping it's a server farm or something else like that," Steve said. "And if it is, then maybe we don't have to go at all because the computer people can blow it up from here. But if it's not, or if they can't, then it's a site visit."

Bucky stood up and rolled his shoulders. "If you need an extra hand, I'll help out," he said, knowing that Steve would correctly interpret that as what he said and not "sure, I'll go."

It was not something that could be blown up remotely, so the mission was a go. They did not need an extra hand, either, so when the team left almost two weeks later, Bucky was in Jackson Heights trying to put together the bed frame he'd bought online to hold his ridiculous mattress when it was delivered tomorrow. Steve sent a text once it was over -- Bucky wasn't sitting by his phone waiting for updates, but he wasn't unworried, either. He sent back a picture of the assembled frame parked between the nightstands he'd put together yesterday.

 _Next up, couches,_ Steve texted back. Bucky sent him a photograph of his raised middle finger.

Steve, who always had to get the last word, played dirty pool because the next text was from Pepper with the website for ABC Carpet and Home, which seemed like the kind of place he'd wished he'd been pointed to earlier on in the process. At least until he saw the prices. But he'd gotten over the worst of his inflation-induced sticker shock and, at this point in the home-buying process, one more multi-thousand-dollar check wasn't going to traumatize him much.

In the meanwhile, Steve's apartment had couches and Bucky was asleep on one of them when Steve turned up in the middle of the night, eyes bloodshot and alight with that particular kind of exhausted electricity that went along with a post-mission adrenaline rush and crash all happening in the back of a cramped transport. Bucky stood up, waited for Steve to present himself for inspection, which he did without comment, and nodded at the result.

"Everyone's good?" he asked, even though he already knew the answer. He'd known that Steve was okay, too, but the answers had more truth to them face-to-face.

"Yeah."

"Good," Bucky replied, then headed off to his bedroom and went back to sleep to the sounds of Steve puttering around in the kitchen.

The next day was his mattress delivery and he got the afternoon off from Hill's questions to wait for it. He'd already bought sheets and pillows, so once everything had been delivered, he dressed the bed, took a picture for Steve, and then lay down. The room was on the empty side of spartan, just blinds and the bed and the two empty nightstands and the odd-lot store lamp he'd gotten to help see when painting, but it was his in a way that nothing else had been since 1941 and he was surprised at how much that meant to him in this moment.

He'd been a little apprehensive about how he'd handle being on his own in a non-combat environment. He had never really spent much time truly on his own -- he'd been under someone's supervision his whole life, going from eating his mother's cooking to being fed by Uncle Sam to being the Winter Soldier. He'd had the six months after the Helicarrier, but that had been a combat situation in a different guise, and then he'd submitted himself to Steve's care and all that came with it. He'd had responsibilities all his life, heavy ones, but sole responsibility for himself had never been one of them. He wasn't sure that this version of Bucky Barnes was the ideal one to try it out, but he was the one left standing and so it was his by default.

But now, lying on his own bed in his apartment with a dining room table but no couch, he accepted that it could possibly not be the disaster he'd feared it would be.

He texted Steve to tell him that he was going to stay in Queens tonight. It wouldn't be roughing it too much -- there was soap and towels in the bathroom because they'd used the shower when painting the place and a million options for dinner -- but he would have even if it had been. At his next shrink session, he'd maybe have to confess to Sahni that he'd perhaps over-focused on what he was getting away from when he'd decided to leave the Tower instead of what he was going toward.

 _Peace_.

He slept through the night, not always a given, and was making coffee with the stovetop percolator Steve had found at some flea market when his buzzer rang the following morning. His building didn't have a video link to the front door, but a tiny remote camera surreptitiously installed was one of many additional security features he'd acquired from both Tony and Hill. He expected to see Steve when he turned on the monitor, so he was surprised when it wasn't.

He took out a second mug and went to go open the apartment door after buzzing Natasha in.

She was incognito in winter outerwear and sunglasses and carrying a large bag that turned out to contain a loaf of dense black bread, a box of Maldon salt, and a bottle of red wine. "Khleb da sol," she said with a wry expression as she placed them on the counter.

"I think we're doing it backward," Bucky said as he got down a dish to pour the salt into and a knife to cut the bread. But he offered her the bread and salt anyway, then went to the fridge to get out the milk for the coffee and butter for the bread. He didn't know why she was here -- it could be simple curiosity since she hadn't seen the place yet except in pictures, but he suspected it wasn't. They got on fine away from the interrogation sessions, but it had always been with other people, never the two of them alone. He didn't think he'd ever been alone with her since he'd come back and he didn't think that had been an accident.

"Do you want the nickel tour?" he asked, turning the bread cut-side down. Past experience said bread like this would take days to get stale, which was maybe just as well because he didn't have anything to put it in. His kitchen was better stocked than the rest of the apartment, but that just meant he had dishes and silverware, not a breadbox.

"Show me your palace," Natasha agreed, setting down her mug.

His palace was what was called a "junior four" in real estate jargon, which was just a fancy way of saying 'a one bedroom with an extra bit of space.' It didn't take long to show, especially mostly unfurnished, and he was glad he'd made the bed and hung up his damp towel already.

Natasha made approving noises at appropriate junctures and gave him the name of another place to look for occasional furniture and followed him back to the kitchen to their still-hot coffee. He cut a few more slices of bread and turned on the burner under the frying pan to toast them. His kitchen had room for a table, but all he had right now were a couple of tall stools to eat at the counter and Natasha sat on one of them while he flipped toast.

"You told Hill that Department X used to give you girls," she began, eyes firmly fixed on her mug. "Was I one of them?"

"Not the way you're thinking," he answered, looking up as he plated the bread and reached for the butter to slather all of the slices. He brought the plate over to where she was sitting and put it down. "How much do you really remember?"

He'd suspected from the beginning that she didn't remember him from Russia, a suspicion confirmed through one awkward half-conversation-half-apology for what had happened in Odessa. He didn't know, however, if she was missing all of it or just him. He didn't know everything they'd done to her, just what he'd been forced to witness. That had left a lot of time for their former masters to get up to very bad things.

"Not enough," she replied, picking up a piece of toast with delicate fingers. "I was born in 1984. You were sold to Pierce in 1991. I remember you from the training grounds, but you told Hill that you hadn't been a trainer since the 60's. I remember you from... _elsewhere_ , at least I think I do, but we were never officially in the same place until Odessa in 2009. Either you've been lying or I'm not as free of my conditioning as I thought I was."

The last was said with much dignity and much bitterness and, if one listened closely enough, much fear. Bucky understood the fear intimately. He'd felt his world unraveling on the Helicarrier, everything he'd believed about himself coming undone under Steve's calm barrage of faith and what turned out to be truth. He'd felt himself crack open even as he'd been whaling away at Steve. He'd thrown those last few punches as both Bucky and the Winter Soldier, furious and bewildered and terrified, somehow both emptied out and overflowing. He'd been both men as he'd jumped after Steve and dragged him to shore. Six months in exile had shown him that he always would be both men, but it hadn't been enough time to forget those first terrifying moments of Bucky's re-emergence or to conquer the fear that the Winter Soldier might win in the end, reclaimed and reprogrammed and repurposed, and Bucky hid away once more, never to be found. He would never not be afraid, but he would, in time, handle the fear better. He hoped.

He didn't know what she hoped for, in general or by coming to him.

He didn't know much about her life as she'd thought she'd lived it, just bits that had come up in context or that Steve had mentioned. She'd defected, disillusioned with Russia, and Barton had played a part, but as either engine or beneficiary, they wouldn't say, if they even really knew. The same thing had happened the other month after Insight with SHIELD and Steve in Barton's role, events more immediate but the story still muddied by the churn. She liked to pretend at being an independent operator now, but people like her -- like himself -- didn't know what that meant and so it really was just pretending.

Whether she would appreciate him tearing away a few more of her fictions, he couldn't guess. But she'd come to him and he owed her that much, whether she wanted it or not. He'd promised her once upon a time and he'd live up to it, even if she no longer remembered the arrangement.

"You weren't born in 1984," he settled on as a beginning. "I don't know when you were born, probably the late Thirties if I had to guess. One of the war orphans the Red Room scooped up."

After the fighting had finally ended, there'd been millions of them, their fathers killed fighting the Germans and their mothers unable to care for them. Natasha, mouth full, nodded once, sharply. She knew the history, although she'd apparently not realized it had applied to her.

"We met for the first time in 1953, when I was a trainer for the Red Room," he went on, pausing for a sip of coffee. "It was a test, to see how I handled an extended period out of the tank. The Red Room provided a controlled environment and plenty of surveillance and got a tutor in hand-to-hand combat in the exchange. You were, I don't know, maybe fourteen? It was hard to tell because you were already on the drugs, so you could have been older, but I don't think you were."

The Red Room girls had been given a variant of the super-soldier serum, but not a strong one. The Soviet scientists hadn't been able to use what was in Bucky's blood to reverse engineer what Schmidt and Zola had done, nobody had ever figured out what Erskine had done to Steve, and then everything, it turned out, was different for women. The Red Room version had just made the girls a little more supple and a little more resilient and only for as long as they were on it, like a steroid but without the bulking up. But the side effect was that while they were on it, it slowed the aging process because it repaired cell damage.

"I started the injections when I was twelve," she confirmed, eyes on the bread in her hand. "Vitamins, they said. To make us grow strong. And then once we were grown, it was to control our menses and keep us from getting pregnant. It did all that, but we knew what else it did. And what would happen if they stopped giving it to us."

Even if she hadn't known how old she really was, she'd have understood that by giving up the Red Room, she had been giving up a kind of immortality. She'd chosen to die, not soon, but much sooner than it would otherwise have come, in exchange for what she'd thought had been her freedom. He was sure none of the others knew anything about it.

She wasn't looking at him, but he nodded anyway before continuing. "The next time I saw you was 1959. You were already blooded, sent up to Moscow to do whatever, you never told me what. They brought me in to test your suitability for foreign deployment. We went to Riga, did our thing, and you got your clearance for worldwide service and the rank of Black Widow. That night, you climbed into my barracks window."

She did look up at him then, a sort of wry half-smile on her lips. He kept himself from examining it for anything deeper and shrugged, turning back to the plate for more bread.

"We were lovers," she said softly and he made a noise of agreement. "For how long?"

He turned away before answering, seeing it all in his memories and not wanting her to see it in his eyes. She would remember it all or she wouldn't and she would form her opinions on what did come back and he didn't want his memories to color hers. But mostly, he didn't want to make himself vulnerable to her. He didn't know _this_ Natasha very well and he didn't have any basis to trust her with anything so precious as this. They could have his medical files, they could see his kill count, they could watch video of him being conditioned by HYDRA, but this, the sum total of his actual happiness in seventy years of torture, this wasn't on offer.

"Three years."

He grabbed a piece of toast and focused on eating it, not wanting to either invite more questions or see how she'd taken the answers she'd already gotten. He honestly wasn't sure if he wanted her to remember or not, for her sake or for his own. She seemed to be doing fine now without the knowledge and, as for himself, he wasn't sure he wanted to have one more person holding his present self up to the ghost of his past. Steve understood that he wasn't the Bucky from before, just as Bucky knew that Steve now wasn't the man he'd been in 1944, but they were both similar enough to their past selves that the points where they weren't were jarring and awkward and painful. He and Natasha were jarring and awkward enough already without adding in a past intimacy.

The silence stretched, into the next piece of toast and then a refill of coffee and he tried not to be relieved that she didn't ask for more details.

His phone rang and it was Steve, asking him how the night had passed and whether he planned to spend the day in Queens or whether he was coming back. Steve didn't sound worried, but Bucky knew he was and so he assured him that everything was fine, he was having breakfast in his kitchen, and was thinking of going to the fancypants home store Pepper had sent the link to and, by the way, Steve got no points for subtlety there. He did not tell Steve that Natasha was there because Steve knew as well as he did that the two of them didn't socialize on their own. Steve liked Natasha, full stop, but that didn't mean that he didn't think that sometimes she stabbed people to see how they bled. Bucky promised to call him if he went to ABC Carpet "so you can pick out your couch."

"He likes to worry," Natasha said after he'd put his phone back in his pocket. "He does it even when he doesn't have to."

Which was maybe her thanking him for not telling Steve she was there and maybe her assuring him that the damaging part of her visit was over. Once upon a time, he'd have been able to tell, but it was a dangerous game to play now. Especially now.

She pulled out her own phone and sent him, she said, a couple of links to furnishing stores that might appeal, and then she stood up and went to where she'd left her coat and hat.

"Spotting recognition is vital to a spy's survival," she told him once she was all bundled up again. "I didn't think I'd seen your face before, but I knew you'd known mine. There are a lot of things in my head that I'm not sure are true and more that I'm sure aren't but might as well be because they are lies that I have build my life around. And then there are the mysteries."

He was one of them, she didn't have to say.

After she left, he washed the dishes and put the bread back in the bag it had come in and put it in the freezer. He didn't get to ABC Carpet because Hill called him and asked if they could reschedule tomorrow morning's session for today.

The days passed and he put his life together bit by bit, keeping it together during the interrogations and falling apart during therapy, buying a breadbox and a desk set (but still no couch), and telling Steve, after the fifth time it came up, that if he wanted anything hanging in a frame on Bucky's walls, he'd have to make it himself. Which Sam chose to see as a gauntlet to pick up and slap Steve in the face with as far as getting a hobby.

Tony asked for and received another appointment with the arm and, in return, offered a holographic sleeve that would make his arm look real. It wouldn't do anything for how it felt when touched, but, come springtime, he could walk around in short sleeves without drawing stares. He didn't really hide it now, but it was cold weather and he wore a glove for traction half the time anyway. Most people who saw his hand thought he was a vet, which he was, he supposed, and it didn't draw the kind of stares it once might have. But there was footage from the Beltway on the internet, grainy and pixelated and out of focus, of a long-haired man with a metal arm. Bucky kept his hair cut fashionably short now -- it had been the first thing he'd done, almost -- and wore contemporary civilian clothes, but the whole arm visible was different than just a hand. The holographic sleeve would be useful as, hopefully, would be whatever readings Tony was taking of the arm because finding people who could do maintenance on it now was going to be harder than it had been before HYDRA's lifetime warranty had been voided.

Natasha left him alone, more or less, reverting to the status quo ante her visit. But he could feel her watching him sometimes during social occasions and he could admit privately that he wasn't sure if it was better or worse knowing that she was probably imagining what he might have been like as her lover rather than when he used to assume that she was looking for the best way to take him down should he suddenly turn violent.

He knew she'd probably approach him again about their shared past, but he didn't set about providing opportunities for her to do so. He didn't forget about it, he couldn't now that he knew she had some awareness of it, but it stopped being the first thing he thought of when he saw her. And the longer it went on, the easier it got. Until things changed.

"Why did we end things?" she asked him one evening when it was just the two of them in the balcony garden on the Tower rooftop. It was January and bitterly cold even at ground level, let alone in this windy aerie above Midtown, but the garden was heated somehow that made it bearable if you stood at the railings and comfortable if you sat down. Bucky was standing, looking north and picking out the landmarks by the city lights.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Nothing's come back to you?"

He didn't want to have to give her a play-by-play of their time together; it would be too painful in the recollection and stripped of too much in the telling. It was precious to him in a way few things were nowadays and he didn't want to diminish it. And he didn't want to be maneuvered into presenting it to her anyway and then have her not value it, too. It would be her right, of course, but he didn't want to have to face it.

She came to the railing next to him and leaned forward, close but not touching. "New memories? I don't think so. But a lot of memories now have... context. Things that made no sense if I had really been the Natasha born in 1984 now do." She paused, long enough for him to look over, but she kept her gaze on Manhattan even as she balled her fists inside the sleeves of her sweater. "I remember you. Or maybe I should say that I now know that the man I remember is you. I'd never remembered your face or, somehow, your arm. But I remembered someone's laughter and I remembered someone's gentleness and I remembered feeling safe and happy when I was with him. And I remembered that he felt the same with me."

He closed his eyes because he could feel tears pricking. It was a lot to feel, to have those treasured memories shift from the collection of ones he alone had to the ones he shared with another person. To admit that the woman next to him was the girl he'd loved and lost.

"The lives we led didn't lend themselves to great romances," she went on, her voice with a raw edge it hadn't had before, as if the confession had been torn from her throat by force. "I don't know how we parted or why, but I can make guesses and I don't know if they'll be better or worse than what really happened."

"It depended on where you were standing," he said quietly.

She waited, they both waited, and then he felt her hand on his arm and he opened his eyes. "James, _please_."

She looked up at him with such dread and need that he turned away because his first reaction had been to kiss her forehead, the way he once had soothed her.

"We were in Cuba in '62, the Missile Crisis," he began, feeling her hand on his metal arm squeeze minutely and then relax, but not drop away. "We were there for a while, before, during, and after. It was a tropical paradise and we were far from our winter and our masters and we got careless. When we got back to Moscow, they were waiting for us with photographs and the testimony of our fellow agents.

"There was no way to pass it off as a casual affair, not with the pictures, so they couldn't just order us never to see each other again. The problem wasn't the sex. So they did what they always did when confronted with a problem they couldn't easily solve."

"They obliterated us," she supplied matter-of-factly.

He nodded and rubbed his face with his free hand, as if that would make what happened next go away.

"The mindwipe tech that HYDRA uses now hadn't been invented yet," he went on, pushing himself to get the words out. He felt her pull lightly on his arm, but he couldn't do this if he was looking at her, so he stared at Central Park instead. "It was all chemicals back then, cocktails of drugs that were supposed to burn away memories while leaving the 'useful' bits intact. It was all experimental and it failed more than it succeeded, but you were _a_ Black Widow and I was _the_ Winter Soldier and if they had to risk losing one of us, it wasn't going to be me."

He heard her exhale loudly and she took her hand off his arm, hugging herself, and he could pretend for her that it was just because of the cold. He didn't think she wanted anything more from him right now than the protection of her dignity. She looked brittle and a little fragile, like the strong wind might blow her away, but he knew it wouldn't. Even when she'd been his, she'd been tougher than she'd appeared, and everything she'd been through afterward, everything she'd done, had only made her stronger. She shivered once and then not again.

"They strapped you down on a table and brought in a tray full of needles and you wouldn't give them the satisfaction of begging or crying. You knew what was going to happen, what they were going to take, and you kept your eyes on me until the drugs took over and you passed out," he continued, voice flat. "My share of the punishment was to stand there and watch them hurt you, watch them take everything you were that was _Natalia_ and destroy it. I had to stand there and wait until you woke up again and looked at me and saw nothing. So I'd know and they'd know that everything we'd once been was gone."

He stopped talking and they were silent, him lost in the pain of his memories and her to whatever the realization had sparked. She'd turned her face from him slightly, hiding without hiding, and it was easy to give her this because he didn't want to see it, either. He'd never once voluntarily recalled that day; when he thought about the end of 'them,' it was before, always before, stopping well short of their return to Moscow. He saw her in her bathing suit and hat, fair skin finally tanning to gold after months in the sun, laughing as she splashed around in the surf. But now instead of seeing her lying on his bed, he saw her lying on the metal table, willing him with her eyes to remember who she was because she would not. And he had, even past the point where it had ceased to mean anything beyond pain, until he hadn't. Until HYDRA had tried to destroy him, too, for daring to be more than they wanted.

"They couldn't do a precision excision, of course," he began again once the silence turned oppressive. Claustrophobic despite the city beneath and around them. "So you were... different in more ways than they'd intended. You had to do some re-training, I think, and they didn't send you out into the field for a while. I went into the tank and didn't come out until the late '60s, so I can't tell you more than rumors. By the time we worked together again, you'd settled into your new personality and seemed fine with it."

She laughed bitterly. "Of course I was," she agreed. She looked up at him. "Was I very different?"

He suspected that wasn't what she was really asking, that what she really wanted to know was how Natasha _now_ compared with Natalia then, but the truth of it was that he didn't know the answer to that question. The Natasha of now hid everything by habit, lied by default, and trusted nobody with any part of herself she hadn't had to give up to get something she needed. Maybe Barton or Fury had gotten enough in those exchanges to know her well, maybe Steve had gotten a little bit as payment for his actions and his faith in her, maybe he was being offered his first piece tonight as payment for his own memories of her. But it wasn't enough to base a comparison.

"You were different," he answered. "You were colder, not just to me, but to everyone. You... you had always enjoyed the game, but it used to delight you as a _game_ and then after... you got a lot more satisfaction out of it, out of being a puppeteer. You enjoyed manipulating people, taking them apart to see how they worked."

The words, on the face of them, were harsh, and he was sure anyone else would take them the wrong way. But Natasha was a Black Widow trained by the Red Room and she'd understand what he had really meant. That the drugs had stripped her of her kindness, of her compassion, and that had allowed the Red Room to remake her into what they had ultimately desired: a lethal beauty without a conscience. Natasha didn't look offended; she looked almost resigned.

"I did," she agreed quietly. "I do sometimes, still. More than I should. It's instinct to dissect people, to file away all of the useful bits, the soft places, the weaknesses. I can't unsee what they trained me to look for. I try not to use it, to not make it the first weapon I reach for, but it's hard."

He laughed despite himself. "They forged us as weapons, Natalia, only as weapons. We didn't come equipped with switches to turn that off."

He'd realized what he'd called her after the words had come out and he looked down at her, to see how she'd reacted and to apologize, but she shook her head no, it was fine. At least at this moment.

"You did," she said. It wasn't an accusation and he could hear something that might've been envy in her voice.

"I was twenty-six when I fell," he said after watching a helicopter follow the path of the Hudson River north, presumably reporting on the traffic below. "I was a man, not a child. I'd had a life before they got me and the hands that had formed me had done so with love and respect. The bad guys could make of me what they did when they had me, but underneath it all, there was still something left to fall back on once I was free."

Natasha -- Natalia -- had never had a chance. And she knew that, but she was too much of a fighter to admit defeat.

"It's not really much easier," he admitted. "To have the person I used to be lurking behind me like a shadow. I can't seem to disappoint Steve without trying very hard. But _him_ , he's real easy to fail."

Natasha made a noise. "Perhaps," she agreed, sounding dubious but that she might be willing to be sold. "But I would still like to meet Natalia some day."

She gave him a wry smile and then turned and left and he watched her go until she disappeared behind one of the trees in their winterized planters. He could hear voices, one Natasha's and the other maybe Barton's, maybe someone else's. As far as he knew, everyone was around, or at least not on an Avengers mission or a PR event. He'd left Steve surfing the web for area rugs when he'd come upstairs. Whoever it was by the patio door, however, they didn't come out and he was left to his own thoughts until they started to make him itch beneath his skin.

When he went back downstairs, Steve had moved from home furnishings to the Urban Dictionary, which was usually a recipe for hilarity and one Bucky wouldn't mind using after the talk with Natasha. Of the two of them, Steve had a better command of idiom because he had spent more time around a broader cross-section of people than Bucky had. But just because he heard more slang didn't mean he always understood what he heard and it was generally less undignified to look things up on the internet than ask one of their friends or colleagues.

"Do I want to know?" Bucky asked as he crossed the living room on the way to the kitchen to put up water for tea. He had been wearing a coat up on the roof, but no gloves or hat and his fingers were cold (flesh) and very cold (metal) and his face felt stiff from the wind.

"I'm sure you do, but I'm not telling," Steve replied, sounding more mortified than offended, but amused above all. "If you're making, make enough for me."

Bucky got out the teapot and the box of chamomile. "Did someone compliment your ass again?"

Steve sighed. "Not my ass."

Bucky beamed and Steve gave him a weary look in return.

The following day was mostly terrible, starting with Hill revisiting how he'd spent his 'tour' in Afghanistan in 2010. With his beard grown in, dressed in full Special Forces battle rattle down to Oakley wraparounds, nobody had looked twice at the operator and his team as they'd gone around undoing the work of the Coalition. He'd created conditions that had elevated troop casualties and extended the war fruitlessly: a warning to a Taliban commander here, a murder of a friendly clan leader there, a rape committed while wearing visible US insignia, a blocked road leading to an ambush of Coalition forces, a bomb blowing up the new well the Brits had built for a community, an escort of a wanted fighter to safe territory, whatever had been necessary to make the war unpopular at home and a failure abroad. Weakening the will of the Coalition nations to send more to die in the Graveyard of Empires, weakening US foreign influence by showing them incapable of protecting their friends or stopping their enemies, giving hope and resolve to the forces of chaos and terror. It had been a long mission, but a fruitful one and Pierce, when he'd returned to US soil, had been full of energy and praise, lit up from within at what this would accomplish. It made him sick to his stomach now and Hill wasn't going over it to rub his nose in it, instead to get more details, more names, more possibilities for who within the Pentagon might still be HYDRA and hadn't been cleansed by the purge still ongoing.

After a break for lunch he ate because he had to - his metabolism, like Steve's, made meals and snacks a requirement even when he felt nauseated - he had to report to his shrink. The first half of the session was spent trying to undo the damage the morning had done, but then the rest was about Natasha. Or, more precisely, his responses to her questions and her search for her own past. They'd talked about Natasha before, about being around a woman whom he'd loved and lost and who first didn't remember him and now did. Today they talked more about it, including the fact that he hadn't yet said anything to Steve and whether he had an obligation to. (No, which didn't ease his guilt about lying by omission.) Therapy always left him drained, but he'd come into the session on an empty tank, if not necessarily an empty stomach, and afterward he was running on fumes, if that. He found himself dreading the idea of going back to the Tower and seeing people who could reasonably expect him to carry on a meaningful conversation, even Steve, who knew better than to expect much out of him on therapy days. So he walked around for a while, letting the white noise of city life buffer him, before going down to catch a train. The F came first and he got on and then, without really much forethought at all, didn't get off at 42nd, staying on until Roosevelt Avenue-Jackson Heights. He picked up some ema datse from the Bhutanese place on the way to his apartment, sat on the giant pillow that was his entire living room furniture, and ate.

He got a text from Steve two hours after he should've been back - this wasn't the first time he'd taken the scenic route after therapy - with "okay?" as the sole message. Steve knew the answer was no, or else Bucky would've been back at the Tower by now, but that wasn't really what he asking. "Are you safe?" was a more loaded question, however, and so this would do. Bucky took a picture of the almost-empty takeout container next to the pillow. Steve's response was to ask if he'd be back tomorrow and Bucky confirmed that he would be.

When he did return, Steve was working at the dining room table, maps and tablet and laptop and spiral notebook arrayed strategically.

"Hey," he said and waited for Steve to look up and look him over. Steve understood and supported the move to Queens, but he maybe hadn't anticipated Bucky using it in its current unfinished form as an escape from his own home, which he had tried hard to turn into a safe place for Bucky. And Bucky, who hadn't anticipated it, either, could see how that might not feel like the best thing ever. It wasn't about escaping Steve, but there was no way to explain himself without making it seem like Steve was part of the problem. "Sticky buns?"

The place smelled like cinnamon and sugar and orange. Neither he nor Steve had much of a repertoire in the kitchen, but Steve had started to bake a little.

"Soon to be," Steve agreed. He sounded a little strained and Bucky didn't think he was wholly responsible.

"What got dropped on your head?" he asked, putting his coat away and taking off his shoes.

"Brody, Poland," Steve replied, gesturing with his chin toward the table. "Don't know if it's HYDRA returning to its roots or just coincidence or what, but... I don't think it's a coincidence and I don't like what it could mean if it isn't."

The timer went off in the kitchen and Steve got up to get the buns out of the oven. Bucky went over to where he'd been sitting and looked over the spread of notes and photos, most of which dated back to the early 1940s. Brody had been a Jewish center of culture, which of course meant that the Germans had wanted to pulverize it and salt the ashes, and then the Soviets had destroyed what was left in the takeover. There were photos of Soviet aircraft and it took Bucky a second to place them in time as from the 1960s.

"I think I might have been here a few times," he said as he flipped through the photos on the tablet. Soviet-era air bases all tended to look alike, but the one at Brody had a fairly distinctive yellow-checked paint job on the side of one of the hangars that rang a distant bell of familiarity.

"It would make sense," Steve confirmed as he dropped the potholders on the kitchen island and came back to the table. "As a transit point to the West, the airbase is a good location. But the actual place, it's about three klicks northeast, if it's as old as its architecture... it might have been one of the places they took you after you fell."

He felt a shudder of revulsion, but that was it. His memories of his earliest captivity were the most incomplete, muddled by the initial head injury and the massive amounts of drugs the Germans and Russians had pumped into him both to keep him alive as well as transform him into the Winter Soldier. He'd seen the file Natasha had compiled for Steve; he'd been a goodly way to dead when he'd been found, broken by the fall and then battered by illness and infection. They'd had to fight for his survival before they could risk killing him with supplements to the serum already in his veins. He didn't remember much of that time and, what he did remember, was efficient caretaking.

"You gonna need me to go back?" he asked. "This doesn't look like a tiny op."

Steve grunted agreement and sat down in the chair next to where he'd been sitting, now where Bucky was. "I was kind of hoping to keep you out of this one, but I don't know how much of an option that's going to be. Especially if Clint can't get back in time from whatever he's going to be doing for Fury next week."

Bucky smiled. "You don't have to worry about my delicate sensibilities on this one," he assured. He didn't enjoy mayhem, but that didn't mean he'd shy from it if required. "Show me what you got."

Steve didn't hide his relief. By necessity, he was the planner of all of the Avengers operations, the ones they could anticipate like this one as well as the make-shit-up-in-the-field kind that happened because the enemy got a vote. Bucky had supervised his transformation from eager pupil to savvy tactician during the war -- supervised, not engineered, which was how historians liked to put it because Steve had been a little too good at deflecting credit. Steve's time in the future had been well-spent learning modern warfighting, but he still liked the comfort of going over what he'd designed with someone who could give an educated assessment and wasn't intimidated by the legacy of Captain America. There were others who could fill the spot -- Barton was a good choice, Sam in a pinch because he had had to learn some ground skills as a PJ -- but Bucky was his first choice, even on missions where the Winter Soldier stayed behind. Bucky didn't mind; rather than being some antiquated ritual done out of nostalgia, it was actually a good way for the two of them to get used to their newer personalities. Steve's work with SHIELD had given him experience he'd never learned with the Commandos and Bucky, well, the Winter Soldier had followed orders, but he'd given them in the field and could look at things more completely than Sergeant Barnes ever had.

(One of the misconceptions he'd had to clear up during Hill's interviews was that he'd been a dog on a leash for HYDRA's suborned STRIKE teams. "You think Rumlow and his type ran _me_?" he'd laughed. "He might've backstopped the doctors in garrison to make sure I didn't attack, but out in the field he followed my orders, not the other way around.")

With a snack break to sample the sticky buns and then a lunch break, they worked until mid-afternoon on the mission planning. The actual objective was intelligence acquisition, either human or electronic or both, and those always had greater requirements than smash-and-burn ops. Some of those requirements couldn't be met without more resources than they could bring to bear and still have any hope of a covert action, but the rest... they'd done more with less back with the Commandos.

(More than once since his return, he and Steve had mused what the Commandos might have done with the technology available to them now. 'Win the war singlehandedly' was usually the answer.)

"Are you excluding Banner or is Banner excluding Banner?" Bucky asked as they looked over the breakdown of tasks again. The intel they'd gotten on the place said that there was probably human testing going on -- it's what HYDRA had used it for originally, slaughtering a couple thousand Jews and Poles in their attempts to recreate what Erskine had done to Steve and Zola had done to him. Having someone who could quickly assess what was scientifically useful to take with them and what was just an easily-purchased reagent would be an effective force multiplier for a team too thinly stretched.

"Right now, it's my call," Steve answered, "but Bruce hasn't exactly been asking to tag along. He's not real good on missions with a high potential for encountering suffering, not if we need him and not the Other Guy. But you're right, if he can go, we could use him."

The original intel, it turned out, had come from Fury, which gave it a few points for credibility but no guarantee that things hadn't changed since he'd called it in. Tony did something presumably illegal to get them satellite imagery and SIGINT and they watched and waited and made changes as seemed prudent, all the while knowing that it wouldn't make a damned bit of difference when they landed in Poland.

The Avengers were a completely different beast than the Commandos had been and Bucky appreciated how much harder Steve's role was here, where his ability to give orders was directly related to the consent of those accepting them instead of an obedience required by law. Warfare didn't work as a democracy, it never had, but Steve was expected to make it work anyway. Barton and Wilson would follow orders, as would Rhodes when he was around, but Thor's royal dignity sometimes got in the way, Tony's ego more frequently, Natasha did whatever the hell she wanted, and the Hulk was corralled and not controlled. And Bucky, when he was along, couldn't be Steve's team sergeant, couldn't back him up with either the custom of the service or the weight of rank. He was not an Avenger, not one of _them_ , and while they could respect his prowess, that didn't mean they would follow him anywhere, even if he were pointing in the direction Steve had led them.

At Brody, Steve led them into an awful lot of shooting. Far too much for what Fury had told them - and subsequent intel had seemed to confirm - was a research site. It wasn't more than they could handle, but it was far more than they'd expected and Bucky brought that up over comms.

"Ambush?" Sam repeated, sounding less than surprised from up high, where he was fighting from the sky with Tony. "Would explain the ratio of shooters to white coats."

The shooting went on for a while outside the compound, but nobody got shot in any part that wasn't protected by armor. When things slowed down a little, Steve ordered Bucky and Natasha to join him in moving inside and clearing the building. Tony and Sam were handling the remaining shooters well enough and Bruce, sitting in the jet until needed one way or the other, could relax and wait until it was safe for him to venture out as Doctor Banner instead of needing the Other Guy out to save anyone's bacon.

A shoot house was a shoot house, be it a training exercise or a medieval castle retrofitted first by Nazis and then their less racially pure spiritual descendants. Steve led with the shield, followed by Bucky double-fisting on semi-auto, and Natasha watched their backs, picking off anyone who might have flanked them. Room to room, thorough but quick, until everyone was dead because this was HYDRA and they preferred it that way.

"I don't like this," Steve said when they'd finished the floor. Upstairs and downstairs were both unchecked, but three of them couldn't hold the ground floor and do the rest either safely or thoroughly. "Everyone we've found is in battle armor. This was supposed to be a lab, not a garrison."

After first checking with the other two, Bucky swapped out the clips in his rifles. He outfitted differently working with the Avengers than he had as the Winter Soldier. He wasn't dressed to intimidate, but for functionality. He wore a kevlar top with both arms covered under a plated LBV and carried more extra clips than fully-loaded weapons. He still wore ballistic eyewear, but it was something of Tony's design, capable of night vision as well as sun protection and had a tiny HUD that Bucky actually kind of hated but had still spent an afternoon getting used to because on missions where Tony wasn't available, having access to JARVIS could make a difference. Here and now, Tony was present, but he'd been sending relevant images to Bucky's glasses, which was something else he'd had to train to get used to.

"Our intel was crap to start with or we're not as airtight as we think we are," Natasha agreed. "Do we bother looking for anything or just figure they've cleared out?"

"We look," Steve replied before Bucky could. "Just because they're setting us up doesn't mean there's no booby prize."

Bucky inaugurated his new clip by shooting a HYDRA trooper who'd come around the corner, already wounded but still looking to make his mark. The mark was on the floor, where he fell after Bucky had shot him in the head.

"Buck, you and Natasha go downstairs and see what you two can see," Steve ordered, unfazed by the action. "I'll hold up here until I can get Sam inside. Unless the basement's a secondary attack point, I think we've run their gauntlet. If it _is_ a secondary attack point, I want you two backing the hell out and waiting for support. Am I clear?"

Steve was looking more at Natasha than at him; Steve knew he'd follow his orders, but Natasha...

"Crystal," Natasha agreed, but Bucky didn't think that meant anything and he didn't think Steve did, either, because he gave Bucky a look that Bucky interpreted as a command to throw Natasha into a fireman's carry and run if he had to.

The way downstairs was part movie set and part old war; the Winter Soldier hadn't spent too much time prowling around medieval castles, but Sergeant Barnes of the Commandos had run into a few. The uneven steps with their grooves worn from centuries of boots were more hazard than nostalgia piece, but there was no torchlight to flicker menacingly to add to the ambience. There was hardly any light at all. His glasses adjusted to the dimness and switched over to night-vision with an overlay of heat sensors. The downstairs was a couple of large rooms, which was easier for two people to handle than the warren of corridors and vestibules upstairs. There were heat sources galore, but they weren't human - fridges, computers, the usual kind of lab stuff that had been what they'd expected to find.

In his ear, Bucky could hear Steve talking to Sam and Tony and Bruce, getting updates on the action from the first two and simply checking in with the last. Sam was going to land and join Steve, leaving Tony as sole overwatch, which Steve apparently wasn't sure Tony could handle and Tony resented the implication.

"I guess this is where we bring Bruce," Natasha said from behind him as they walked toward the far wall of the first big room. Even in the dimness, the place was obviously a lab and the restraints and marks on the walls and furniture confirmed that it was humans they'd been experimenting on. Bucky had known about it from the briefing, but it had been a 'possibly,' while what was in front of him was a certainty. He filed the knowledge away without reacting to it; he could do that later.

He was about to agree with Natasha when he saw a flare of orange-red in the corner of his goggles' heat map: people. He tapped Natasha on the shoulder and indicated by hand signals right in front of her face what he'd seen. He couldn't tell how many men there were waiting, but it had to be at least half a dozen to register as brightly as they had even mostly obstructed by a wall.

 _Grenade_? Natasha signaled back, her facial expression dubious, but he nodded. He had flash-bangs with him, which would simply ruin their ambushers' (sub-ambushers?) hearing and vision without destroying the environment too much.

Natasha turned her back and covered her ears and Bucky turned off the night optics on his glasses before slowly and silently unhooking a grenade from his vest and rolling it toward where their attackers were waiting. He patted out the countdown on Natasha's shoulder so she'd know; on five the grenade exploded and they ran toward the explosion. They fought well together, not perfectly in sync but showing the effects of having been trained by the same methods. There were more HYDRA troopers than he'd expected, at least a dozen, and it might've been a risk except this was the Black Widow and the Winter Soldier and twice that number wouldn't have been enough.

"How about we don't tell Steve until we have to?" Natasha suggested once it was over. She had taken a blow to the face, a kick probably, and it was cut open and would bruise, but otherwise didn't seem to be any more than winded.

They ended up having to tell Steve because there was no way to hide fifteen bodies once the place was lit up like daytime so that Bruce and Tony could poke around. He gave them a look, but otherwise said nothing and got on with organizing the next phase of the operation.

"Upstairs or babysitting?" Steve asked him once Bruce and Tony were getting set up with their computers and sensors and whatever else sci-fi they'd brought with them. "Sam's back up in the air, but we need to guard a few doors from the ground. Natasha's already got the front."

Neither option was terribly interesting; watching Bruce and Tony yammer at each other in science was hardly binge-worthy television, but standing guard duty was standing guard duty and nobody ever wanted that, certainly not outside in the middle of a Polish winter. Steve certainly didn't, but he'd take it if nobody else would because his ability to order people to do things they didn't want to do when nobody was trying to kill them was even more limited than it was in combat.

"I'll take upstairs," Bucky replied because he was sure Steve got stuck doing the crap jobs most of the time when he wasn't around. "but can I look around for a few first?"

"Sure," Steve agreed, not bothering to hide either his relief or his concern because he knew why Bucky wanted to look around. "You come upstairs and get me when you're done."

Well-lit, the lab looked both more and less terrifying; the gothic shadows were gone, but the stark brutality of what this place had been remained. There were metal tables with restraints that were too modern to have been anything he'd have experienced, at least back in '44 or '45. The cells, however, those looked old enough. Stone walls and iron bars and an iron bedframe without a mattress that could have been from his father's war, let alone his own. There had been tattered sheets stained with dried blood crammed into a corner and those had been bagged with the hope of examination and maybe identification, but the cell was empty now, at least of things. There was a fog of evil and pain and terror that weighed down on him like a wet blanket and he forced himself not to flinch or flee. The wall by the bedframe had tiny gouges in the stone, the work of how many desperate fingers over how many desperate nights. He had no idea if his had ever been among them, if he'd even been here at all. Additional research had said that it was a good possibility, but his memory remained unsparked and better off for it. He felt uncomfortable in his own skin right now and his left arm, normally a natural part of him in a way that he couldn't explain to either Steve or Tony, felt like a shackle, a weight dragging him down to where he didn't want to be.

He still made a careful tour of the rest of the cells before going upstairs to relieve Steve, who gave him a quick handover briefing before running inside out of the cold.

Sam was flying lazy circles above them in the darkness -- it was another hour before nautical dawn -- and Natasha was keeping a silent watch at the front. Bucky took over Steve's sector, which might've been picturesque in the daylight if winter hadn't wreaked its havoc on the tiered gardens and vine-covered stone walls. But as it stood, it was just depressing and full of potential spots for bad guys to hide. It was quiet for now and bitterly cold; he didn't feel it like he once had, but it was still uncomfortable to keep still enough to be an effective sentry. He felt bad for Natasha, whose uniform was insulated but who was still small and thin and not nearly as used to the winters in this part of the world as she had once been no matter what she insisted.

Sam's reports from on high were mostly about which body parts were freezing off and liable to drop on their heads, right until they weren't. At which point they became a warning to Bucky that a second wave was on approach.

"Stay where you are," Bucky told Natasha when she asked if he wanted help. "These may not be the only ones."

He didn't tell Steve to stay put when he said he was coming back up, instead warning him not to draw attention or fire. Sam was reporting seventeen bodies moving forward in a tight grouping and that would not be more than he could handle, but it would be enough to keep him busy. Especially because he, like everyone else using conventional weapons, was running out of ammo. (Tony's blasters were fine, but he'd been told to stop firing anything else before he went bingo.) They'd armed themselves heavily enough to easily survive the ambush, but they would run out of bullets if they had to escape a second one of any duration.

Right on cue, Sam reported more incoming, this time on Natasha's side. Steve was already on his way upstairs and told Sam to stay put but Tony to get ready to armor back up and help out if called. Steve was going to Natasha's aid; Bucky had more ammo left and less need to rely on it. Natasha knew a thousand ways to kill a man, but going up against a heavily armed strike force singlehandedly was not what Black Widows were trained for. Steve and Bucky, on the other hand, were.

"You want an assist, you just call," Sam told him as he waited, down on one knee with his head bowed to make his profile lower. The patio or whatever he was kneeling in was mostly surrounded by a stone half-wall and his head was level with its top. He could hide behind it if he had to, but he was hoping he wouldn't have to; seventeen against one only worked if he took the offensive. "Don't think you'll need one, but know that the offer's there."

He watched and waited as his attackers approached on silent feet, fanning out with their rifles up and ready. These weren't amateurs. The army waiting for them earlier hadn't been, either, but they'd been purpose-trained, given enough skills to be sent somewhere as cannon fodder and take someone out with them before they were killed. The men coming at him now had been killing for far longer than HYDRA had needed its own army; they might have once been a STRIKE team, they might have once been an SAS team, they might have once been Spetsnaz or any other nation's elite forces. It didn't matter. He was still the Winter Soldier.

He let them draw close, too close to make the rifles an effective weapon. He pulled his pistols out of their holsters slowly, silently, and took a deep breath. He started firing before he charged forward, aiming himself toward the one who'd been giving the hand signals, dropping the pistols when they clicked empty and switching to his knives. The precious moments it took the attackers to realize what was going on, to drop their rifles and switch to weapons for close combat, gave him all the edge he needed. Melee skills weren't as perishable as marksmanship and sparring with Steve or Thor or one of the others was enough of a refresher to keep his instincts sharp as razors. He didn't have to think, just react and follow the fight until he could jump in front of it.

When it was over, he stood there, breathing hard but not winded, body singing too loudly with the adrenaline from the fight to even be able to evaluate for injury. He was still hyper-aware of his surroundings, spinning around on one heel in case he'd missed one or left one alive or if there were more. He hadn't lost his goggles, although they'd been jarred askew, and through them he saw nothing except for the cooling bodies at his feet.

"Falcon, am I good?" he asked. Sam could see further out, tell if anyone else was approaching. He knew how HYDRA's planning worked; there could be more on the way if this had been a trap designed specifically for the Avengers instead of just whatever do-gooding agency stumbled across the place.

"Yeah, you're good," Sam chuffed out. "And you're alone, too. Cap and the Widow are done; Cap's making his way to you because he won't take my word that you are in one piece."

He allowed himself a smile, then looked down at his fallen opponents. He picked up one of their rifles so he'd have something, then scavenged for what other useful bits he could find, including a new pair of pistols. He didn't expect identification, but they had radios because someone was going to have to report back to the boss.

"I'm starting to get the funny feeling that we didn't just stumble into bad intel," Steve said as he came out of the open doorway and on to the patio, making his way from there down the stairs to the grassy lawn where Bucky had fought. "It was fed to us, carefully and with malice aforethought."

"If it quacks like a duck," Bucky said by way of agreement as he found a radio not too covered in blood and, holding it up to Steve so he could see what it was, slipped the earpiece into his own right ear.

Before Insight, HYDRA teams, even if they had been suborned elements of other agencies, like the SHIELD STRIKE teams, had had a standard radio protocol; it was what identified the good guys from the bad beyond the code names. He didn't know if they'd changed any of it since Insight. They should have, as a security measure, but they'd also been in disarray and were, according to Hill, still too decentralized to be making many unilateral decisions, let alone taking all of the precautions they needed to. It was why his own knowledge was still relevant and actionable and why Hill's was the face he saw most often after Steve's.

With a nod from Steve, he keyed the radio and used a common code for 'mission accomplished, waiting for next orders.' His Avengers mic was still live and Sam was asking who he was talking to, but he didn't have time to answer because he got back a response on the HYDRA frequency.

"<Who is this?>" A voice asked in Belgian-inflected French. "<What happened to Myrtle?>"

He spared himself a smile; for a while, back in the late 1990s, HYDRA teams had been given call signs after trees and flowers. All of the operators on those teams had hated it and it had been dropped in favor of animals by the next time he'd been out of the tank, but a few of the old guard had kept their original codenames as badges of honor -- they were too tough to be challenged for having a call sign like Tulip.

"<I'm Myrtle now>," Bucky replied, hoping the team he had just killed hadn't all been fellow Belgians. He'd spoken French fluently by the time he'd fallen -- all of the Commandos save Dum Dum had -- but then and now he sounded like a Gascon, not a Walloon.

Next to him, Steve was on his radio asking Tony if he could trace the signal; the answer was apparently not an easy yes, but he turned away to focus on his own conversation.

His assertion that he was now the team leader of the Myrtle unit was accepted and he was asked for a sitrep and a casualty count. He reported that they'd breached the building from the rear after facing Thor, who was probably not dead but definitely incapacitated, and had lost five with two more too injured to continue. His identification of Thor was questioned, since nobody had reported seeing him or any lightning earlier, to which Bucky spat back a rude comment about knowing a giant hammer when he saw one. He was then issued his next orders.

"Get everyone out now," he told Steve, who stilled. "It's rigged to blow. These mooks were supposed to trap us all in there and boom."

Steve keyed his radio and told Tony and Bruce to start packing up now, there were bombs. "How much time do we have?" he asked Bucky.

Bucky made a face Steve could see with the night optics. "Less than thirty, more then ten. My 'orders' are to see if anyone survived you and Natasha and then herd the Avengers inside, which'll take a few. They don't have eyes on the place, so we can bullshit them a little, but they're the ones with the trigger and the love of martyrs, so I'd go with the low estimate."

Steve nodded, then went to go help Tony and Bruce pack up whatever they were doing. They were clear of the castle in fifteen, going on foot instead of stealing transport back to the plane in case one of the trucks on site was laden with explosives, and once they were on the far side of the outer walls, Bucky called in the proper code.

A minute later, the world whited out. His ears were ringing and he was on the ground, Natasha under him. He felt her pushing at his shoulder and he rolled off, on to his back and then sitting up. He pulled the goggles off because they'd been reset by the flash of light and would take a few minutes to work again.

"Everyone okay?" Steve asked from somewhere to his side. Steve sounded underwater, but only winded, not in pain.

He closed his eyes briefly to readjust to natural night sight, feeling them burn and water. Around him, everyone else checked in. Tony had been armored up and hovering when the bomb had blown and his repulsors hadn't been able to compensate fast enough to avoid him getting blown back-first into a tree, so he was a little sore. Bruce had taken some minor damage but nothing requiring aid. Natasha was untouched besides a sore shoulder because Bucky's instinct had apparently been to protect her. Steve was fine. And Sam, gliding above them, had been blown away quite literally by the shockwave and was winging his way back.

"It's a crater," Sam reported. "What I can see of it. There's no way anyone survived. The three-foot-thick stone walls didn't survive."

The Avengers wouldn't have survived, either, Sam didn't need to add.

Next to Bucky, Natasha was muttering darkly in Russian, Nick Fury the presumed object of her wrath. This had been such a cock-up from the start and Fury was the one who'd led them all to what would have been their doom save for some luck. Bucky didn't consider his own role in their survival any more than that; it sure as hell hadn't been skill.

"Let's get out of here and back to the jet," Steve said, sounding annoyed. "They'll be sending someone to check their handiwork."

The ride back on the jet was long and mostly silent apart from an argument between Natasha, Steve, and Tony about who might be responsible for the ambush and whether it was porous communication (Natasha) or bad intel (Tony). Bucky ignored it mostly, instead focusing on himself. Post-mission was when he felt the disassociation between Bucky Barnes (who he was trying to be) and the Winter Soldier (who had been) most acutely, all the more so because he had nothing else to do but get lost in that confusion. Sergeant Barnes had had the care of his soldiers to focus on while the Winter Soldier had been expected to return to normal function immediately, neither one allowed to ride the adrenaline high or surface naturally after the inevitable crash. But here and now, he had no responsibilities and no expectations and with most of the team engaged in a discussion that was more bickering than fighting, he was a little at sea. He felt out of sorts, a patchwork quilt of the incarnations of the men he'd once been. He'd had Steve's back as they'd cleared the building, he'd fought at Natasha's side, he'd taken out Myrtle's team like the weapon he'd been and the man he was now had no idea how to absorb all of that back into himself.

"So how's the apartment looking?" Sam asked from across the aisle. He and Bucky and Bruce were at the rear of the jet, away from where Natasha was in the cockpit and Steve and Tony were standing close by, the three of them not continuing the argument but definitely continuing the discussion. "I heard you've stayed there a couple of times."

Bucky didn't know if Sam was asking to avoid the tension up front, or because he saw Bucky struggling, or because he honestly wanted to know. It was Sam, so all three were equal possibilities. Sam had been the one to find Doctor Sahni for him, not even bothering to pretend that his own experience as either counselor or vet prepared him for dealing with Bucky's scars. But he'd also reminded Bucky more than once that if he wanted an ear that didn't belong to either the shrink or Steve, he was available. Bucky had never taken him up on it, but not because he didn't trust Sam and he thought Sam understood that.

"The living room's still a pillow and a dollar-store lamp," he answered with a grimace. Whether or not Sam meant it as a way of drawing him out, he'd take it. Staying in his own head too long never ended well. "I think I've seen every couch in New York."

Bruce, en route back to his seat from the mini-fridge with a bottle of water, chuffed out a laugh as he passed by. "My first apartment had bean bags and a futon. And a cat that peed on both."

"If I thought Steve wouldn't sneak in and set them on fire, I'd go with bean bags," Bucky admitted. "He's already threatened to do awful things if I got a futon. You'd think he'd be more helpful instead of being Captain Judgmental when he didn't have to pick out his own couches."

The last was said a little loudly into a silence as the conference up front had ended.

"I found you an area rug!" Steve called back from the cockpit. "It's not my fault you're being picky."

Sam smiled at Steve's indignation. "My first apartment after I got out of the service for real, it took _forever_ to get it fitted out. My parents, my _grandparents_ were all offering me stuff, tables and plates and lamps and whatever, but I said no every time. They kept telling me to take what they had and replace it when I found what I wanted, but I didn't want anything that wasn't gonna be perfect right off the bat.

"I couldn't explain why I needed everything to be _exactly right_ ," Sam said, shaking his head in bemused recollection. "Now, of course, I can tell you all about the need to control my environment and all that stuff, but back then... It took me too long to understand that nobody judges your progress by your lamps, so I just wasted a lot of time and energy and made people nuts. And I ended up getting new lamps a year or two later anyway."

This was how Sam worked, be it with Bucky or Steve or whoever else was on his counseling couch. He never told anyone what to do or that what they were doing was wrong and usually made it sound like he wasn't giving advice at all, say when he told a story that didn't seem to have anything to do with you until it had everything to do with you. There was never a moral at the end of the tale, never a pointed look or a check to make sure you were getting what he was really saying. It was a gentle approach and, surrounded by people who generally took a more direct one, Bucky appreciated it.

"I still think Steve would sneak into my place and set the bean bags on fire," he said, which he was sure Sam could translate into 'thank you' if he wanted.

They got back to New York near dawn and Bucky and Steve made breakfast because they were famished and then went to bed, emerging in time for lunch.

"If you really wanted a bean bag, I wouldn't set it on fire," Steve said as he flipped the calzones on the tray before sticking them back in the oven to continue reheating.

"No, you'd just make a face every time you came into my living room," Bucky retorted easily, making what he considered a very good copy of Steve's disappointed expression. Steve, mouth full of cold pizza - calzones were unpleasant out of the fridge, but they both liked leftover slices that way - could only narrow his eyes. "And if we're gonna live another hundred years, either you're going to get a wrinkle or I'm gonna punch you in the kisser. Or both. So, really, I'm not getting a bean bag for your own good."

"You're still looking after me after all this time," Steve said with cheerfully over-the-top gratitude, the effect of which was spoiled when he realized he hadn't restarted the timer for the oven.

In the aftermath of Poland, the Avengers were occupied mostly by figuring out how they'd gotten set up, a process made more difficult by their collective inability to get in touch with Fury, and making sure that their own network hadn't been compromised. There was little Bucky could do on either front and less he was asked to do because the advantage of being an occasional supernumerary was that nobody ever expected him to do the legwork. Which didn't mean he was free of the tangle entirely - Hill had all sorts of questions about how he'd been able to fool the HYDRA remote commander and what tactics and strategy he had recognized. But it spared him the tense arguments that he only saw second-hand, when Steve came back to their apartment tight around the eyes and went straight to his room to change into workout gear.

Steve was working out further away than the Tower's gym - he was down at Fort Bragg doing something with someone - when Natasha rang the doorbell. "You still need a couch?"

Bucky could only cock an eyebrow; Natasha's interest in and advice on the furnishing of the apartment had been cursory at best. Her interest in _him_ had been cursory at best outside of what he could tell her about her past. Which he respected - he'd had lots of people telling him lots of things about respecting choices and agency - but it didn't mean he wasn't going to get a little wary when she showed up on his doorstep when Steve was a couple of states away.

She looked back challengingly.

"I still need a couch," he confirmed.

"Get your coat and shoes and don't forget your wallet," Natasha told him, gesturing with her chin toward the front closet.

Fifteen minutes later, they were walking down Sixth Avenue squinting into the winter sunshine, first stop Chelsea.

"Did you not like anything out of Ikea because of the style or because of the shtick?" she asked as they made a sharp right turn on 36th to avoid Herald Square. "Because there are other Scandi-style places if you like the aesthetic but don't want to have to put it together yourself."

He made a noise that probably got lost in the din of the street. "I don't mind spareness and simplicity or some-assembly-required, but some of it tips over a little too far into Soviet Brutalist, you know?"

She looked up at him with a wry smile that said that she knew exactly how Scandinavian austerity of form could slide effortlessly into the kind of shit they saw in the old days, the bareness turning into nakedness, simplicity into simple want. Steve liked it and it suited him, to have sharp, clean lines and see a canvas to work on. But for Bucky, and probably for Natasha as well, it wasn't be an opportunity, it was a challenge they'd struggle to meet. Steve's imagination could soften the hard planes and make the result a _home_ , but for him it would be like papering over his own holes, bare spots where his life used to be. He didn't need to live with that kind of metaphor.

"The Japanese do minimalism without the nihilism," she told him. "We can start there."

The Japanese place was nice, uncomplicated instead of reductionist, and he took pictures of lots of decorative items and small tables and lamps, sometimes with Natasha holding them and posing like the most deadly sales girl ever, but he didn't like any of the seating furniture. Japan had a culture of tatami mats and futons and the couches felt like afterthoughts thrown in because they thought someone might ask.

The next place had plenty of couches that weren't lost in translation, but they were maybe lost in something else instead. "Do you know what everything in here looks like?" Bucky asked as they sat on the latest sternly-structured leather couch Natasha had pointed out to him. "It looks like the living room from every luxury apartment real estate listing ever. Like nobody ever lives in those apartments, they just look pretty and dust-free and have $900 glass fruit bowls on the dining tables where nobody's ever eaten a meal."

This earned him a smile. "This is where the interior designer who did the Tower apartments ordered from," she told him in a loud whisper, like she was confessing a secret. "There's my couch."

She leaned toward him so that her right shoulder was against his left and pointed across the room toward a cream-colored leather sectional. He'd never been in Natasha's apartment, never been as far as the front door of it. And, like everything else to do with her, he did not think it had been either accidental or unnoticed.

"So where is Steve's?" he asked instead of bringing that up. He was enjoying himself with her today and didn't want to ruin it. It was nice to get glimpses of the 'new' Natasha, who was neither his Natalia nor the one the Red Room had changed her into for their sins, and find out that she was someone worth knowing, too. It hurt a little, sometimes a lot when she did something or looked a certain way that made him remember who she'd been and who they'd been, but only in the best ways. The ways that reminded him that they had both survived and, despite other opinions to the contrary, done not-so-badly for themselves. But mostly it was nice. "I know he didn't pick out his own. It makes his carping about mine all the more rich."

Natasha was still leaning against his shoulder a little, light pressure and warmth that was the upper limit of his arm's sensory capacity and yet had rarely felt so insufficient. With the question, she righted herself and he felt the loss more keenly than his arm had the capacity to register.

"Over at Canvas on 17th," she replied, gesturing in the appropriate direction. "It's a bit more his speed. We can go there next."

They stopped for a bag of hot roasted chestnuts from a street cart en route, an actual street cart with a yellow-and-blue umbrella and not a food truck, manned by an ancient fellow who was still probably twenty-five years younger than Bucky. He sold canned sodas and dirty water dogs and salt-encrusted pretzels and he roasted chestnuts right in the cart and he was over the moon that Bucky was so excited to see chestnuts.

"I haven't seen these in forever," Bucky explained, embarrassed at his enthusiasm being noted and only worried after the fact that he might be dating himself beyond a point his body could explain. But next to him, Natasha swallowed a laugh and he figured he was just being a dork and not a security hazard.

"They're not big sellers anymore," the vendor lamented as he scooped up the charred nuts with a ladle before dropping them in a paper bag. "The only folks who buy them are the kids who take pictures of their food and the old fogies like me who remember when they used to sell potatoes on the street, too."

Once upon a time, Bucky had spent his fair share of nickels on baked potatoes from a cart, but this he knew better than to share. Judging by Natasha's continued muffled mirth, however, he didn't really have to.

They pit-stopped on the northern side of Union Square Park to eat the chestnuts, Bucky prying open the cross-scored shells with his thumbs and holding out the exposed meat for Natasha to pluck before she decided to try to do it herself. (She dropped the first one and bobbled the second and Bucky did not feel it was unchivalrous to laugh at her for it.) They were hot and sweet and familiar, but nothing that brought back any strong memories or emotions. Just because everything in his life could have meaning now didn't mean that everything did.

Canvas, when they got there, was definitely more Steve's speed, less uptight and more unfussy than their last stop, and if he couldn't find Steve's couch, he saw its siblings along with a few other items that looked suspiciously familiar. It was all plain without being boring, solid and simple and earnest and timeless. It was definitely Steve's tastes, but maybe it wasn't quite his own, although he took a couple of couch pictures with Natasha oblivious in one and posing campily in the others. If they weren't quite what he wanted, they were at least familiar to what he was used to now at Steve's and, mindful of Sam's caution, he thought he could live with that until he found what he really did want.

When they finished, Natasha gave him a thoughtful look, biting her lower lip and eying him speculatively. Once upon a time, he'd have thought her up to mischief. When he'd first come back, he'd have thought she was planning a counterattack. Now, he just waited, curious and hopeful in turns, until she nodded and started walking east.

"What?" he prompted as she grabbed at his elbow to get him to follow. "And where are we going?"

"More couches, Barnes, more couches," she said, letting go of his arm once he fell in beside her. But she was laughing as she spoke and he smiled, too.

He smiled more when they got where they were going, which was a French place near Gramercy Park full of riotous colors and odd shapes.

"It's whimsical," Natasha said when he met her gaze. She'd been watching him take it all in, waiting to see what he thought. This clearly wasn't the sort of place anyone else had thought to suggest to him -- or one he'd necessarily have gone to on his own had he known of its existence. But Natasha had brought him here for a reason and that reason wasn't because she had run out of other options. "Some people can make their own whimsy. Others buy it retail."

From someone else, it might've been an insult, or at least a bit of shade thrown on to his character and personality. But they were who they were and, coming from her, it was a statement as much about herself as it was about him. They had both had too much of themselves to reconstruct for whimsy to be a priority instead of a luxury. But here she was, offering it to him as a gift. A reminder. Not of what they'd been, although it was that, but of what he could be.

He gave her his brightest smile. "Let's go find the couch that'll give Steve the biggest heart attack."

The couches weren't all outrageous and most were quite tasteful, but even the most staid design was offered in bright colors. Sitting on an electric lime green couch wrinkled like a shar-pei, Bucky thought that this was a kind of whimsy he'd be willing to buy retail. If maybe not in lime green. The royal blue, however...

"Give me your phone," Natasha demanded, holding out her hand. He hesitated only a moment before doing so and she took a picture of him on the shar-pei couch. After making sure it came out, she returned, dropping down to curl up next to him and show him the photo. The couch was well-framed in the picture, the wrinkly details defined in all their green glory, but his eyes were drawn to his own image. He didn't look at himself very often; all of his mirror time was spent focusing on his jaw when he shaved or making sure his clothes looked okay before going out. But looking at himself here with his coat unbuttoned and his regular civilian clothes exposed, he realized that the image of himself in his mind wasn't of Bucky Barnes, then or now, but of the blank-stared Winter Soldier from the pictures in the file Hill had. He was honestly surprised by what he looked like now, today, on this ridiculous couch. He looked like a _person_ , like a normal person, albeit one with a metal hand. There was nothing about him that said POW or torture victim or assassin or spy. There was just a man who could be anything or anyone.

He shook himself free of the picture's hold and looked over at Natasha, who was watching him. He recognized in her expression the pride and satisfaction of a teacher seeing a pupil grasp an idea. She knew what he'd seen and was happy for him and that, in turn, made his heart beat a little louder.

They didn't speak about it. He resisted the urge to kiss her cheek -- or anything else -- and got up, holding out his hand to pull her up as well. "I want a picture of the fuzzy one just to make Steve nervous."

Natasha took back his phone but not before handing him a lamp shaped like a mushroom to hold up. "Maximizes the psychedelic potential," she told him. "Smile."

He considered giving her a goofy grin, but if this was for Steve, the more potent look would be a thoughtful smile, like he was seriously considering an aqua fuzzy couch and a green mushroom lamp.

"We'll probably hear the reaction all the way from North Carolina when he sees it," he said as he sent the picture to Steve once he'd gotten his phone back.

Once upon a time, they'd found themselves simpatico because of a shared desire for _joy_ in a world engineered to be without it, to live in a world of color when all they were allowed was black and white. They were different people now, sadder and older in ways that their bodies could not express, but they weren't incapable of silliness or an appreciation for the absurd (which had proved helpful when looking at expensive home furnishings) and that part, that was where their old selves and their current ones were closest. That interface was the hardest part of being around Steve because it emphasized all they'd lost, together and apart, and all they'd cost the other. But here, with Natasha, it was the opposite, a little bit of what had been torn from them by violence recovered. Not undamaged or unchanged, but that it existed at all was still a blessing. A single green shoot in a field sown with salt and ashes.

They looked at a few more couches, respectable ones in color and form, before moving on to other housewares that didn't involve mushroom lamps but were still refusing to take themselves too seriously. Like a red felted vase that looked a little like a ladybug that Natasha seemed intrigued by; he took a picture of it in case they progressed to gifting terms by her next birthday.

Their next stop was lunch in Murray Hill, a few blocks away. Lexington by 28th was chock-a-block with Indian restaurants and Natasha explained that it had earned the area the nickname of Curry Hill. She led them to a quiet restaurant and they directed the waiter to a table that allowed both of them unobstructed views of the door and the street through the plate glass windows. Natasha ordered them a selection of chaat and explained what some of them were -- the others she admitted she had no clue -- and they nibbled companionably and talked about nothing important.

"He didn't want anyone to see them," he explained when Natasha asked why nobody had tasted Steve's latest announced baking adventure, gingerbread men. "They looked fine when the baking sheet went in, but... they kind of hulked out in the oven. They were all big and swollen and instead of neat little soldiers he could decorate, he had a monster army."

Natasha laughed and then coughed because she'd sent food down the wrong pipe.

"They taste really good," he went on once she was fine again, "which is just as well because he won't let them out of the apartment -- not even in a brown paper bag to take to Queens. He thinks he put too much leavening in, but he's not allowed to try again until we finish what we have. He's working up the courage to throw the rest into the blender to make crumbs for the bottom of a cheesecake. I think he's empathizing a little too much with them."

Their lunch came and he got a third of the way into his black chick pea curry before Natasha put her fork down. "You didn't give Hill all of the names you know from Department X and the Red Room."

It was a statement more than an accusation, closer to a question, but it still hit him harder than he'd expected. He'd had a good time today and he thought she had, too, and he'd forgotten, in all of it, that there was a price to be paid for it. That he and Natasha, whatever they had been, were not friends now and did not have the kind of relationship where favors were offered with no thought on the return. That she did not offer of herself for nothing to just anyone and probably didn't know how to anymore. He wasn't angry or disappointed with her, only with himself for forgetting and for why he had forgotten.

"No," he agreed. "Either they haven't come up or they're dead or whatever else. I'm not doing it for a reason."

She waved away the protest with her fork. "I know. The HYDRA connections are more important to what we're doing now."

But not for her, for her search for her past.

She said nothing, though, and he returned to his curry and his lassi, eating more because he had to than because he had any appetite left. He felt a fool, a mark, and it was worse that he knew that she could see it all. She couldn't not see it, she'd told him.

"You gave me back an important part of my life. _Parts_ of my life," she said quietly, gently, and he looked up and where he expected pity, he saw entreaty. "You know exactly how much of a gift that is."

It was his turn to shake off her words. "It wasn't a gift. It was always yours. You just asked me to hold on to it for a while."

She smiled a little, but it was sad. "Then I'll thank you for your care and tell you that you can put that burden down because I'm ready to hold it again."

It wasn't a dismissal and he was grateful for it.

"Now that I know -- for sure -- that what I remember isn't the truth," she went on, "I need to find out the rest. I need to know what they did to me and why. They took you from me as a punishment, but what did I do for them to take me from _myself_? Why did they strip my entire past from me?"

There was a fragility to her voice that was new and strange, foreign to both Natasha and Natalia as he'd known them. She looked very young and very old and very vulnerable and he saw, for the first time, what everyone else had probably seen when they'd looked at him. He had no ability to assess his captors' cruelty to himself; he'd seen what they'd done to Natalia, but now, seeing what it had done to _Natasha_ gave his own past an odd clarity. They'd both survived, but he'd had a life to return to, to rediscover and update. She had only secrets and more lies and not even a real name to carry as her own.

"When Steve and I were trying to stop Insight," she went on in that same soft, urgent tone, "we found the ghost of Arnim Zola and he greeted us with our names and birthdates. But he called me Natalia Alianovna Romanova and he said I was born in 1984. He knew everything that had happened in the world, everything that HYDRA had touched, everything they'd ruined, _everything_. But he didn't know who I was."

He gave her a wry smile. "HYDRA's not infallible or omniscient. We wouldn't be here if they were. You'd be dead and I'd be back in my tank and Steve would have never been allowed to come back to life. They made mistakes constantly, worse for them actually knowing what was going on while everyone else was still blundering around in the fog. They still make mistakes, which is why they keep getting found and taken out."

She smiled back, but couldn't hold it. "HYDRA was working both sides of the Cold War. They had people in Department X just like they had people in SHIELD. They had to know about the serum attempts, about what it did to the Red Room girls. They had to know that I was a Black Widow who'd been active since 1959. But Zola _didn't_ know."

He was quiet for a moment, pushing around his food to organize his thoughts. "Zola was living in a computer," he said finally. "So I've been told. He was like JARVIS, except running off of older tech. In theory, you can mess with JARVIS's memory, do something like get him to forget who Mickey Mouse is or how to run Tony's suit. It was probably a lot easier to do something to Zola's memory, to splice out some tape and have him forget anything that wasn't convenient."

Natasha tilted her head thoughtfully. "I must have been very inconvenient."

He smiled broadly. "I am quite sure you were," he assured, meaning every word. "But who thought so and what they did about it, that I can't even begin to guess."

Whatever had happened in the Red Room -- and he was as sure as she was that whatever had been done to her memory had been done there -- it had to be separate from what had been done to Zola. If anything had been done to Zola. He thought it completely possible that Zola had never known, that the US-based HYDRA command had never known, and that Natasha hadn't been the only secret kept from them.

He had Steve had talked about this, about how everyone now seemed to take HYDRA's claims at face value instead of giving them the same steep bullshit discount the SSR had during the war. Steve's theory was that it made everyone feel better to have been outplayed by such a strong opponent, which Bucky thought had some merit. But for all of his and Steve's extensive first-hand experience in dealing with HYDRA claiming credit for coincidences and plain old making things up, they weren't ever going to make much headway in convincing the others that they were granting HYDRA a competence they'd never possessed. According to Hill and Fury and even Natasha sometimes, Steve had missed too much time entirely to 'properly understand the context' and Bucky, while present at some of the key events in question, was deemed an unreliable witness despite the fact that his memory was perfectly intact.

Keeping that in mind, he chose to focus on what had really happened instead of what might have: what the Red Room had absolutely wrought instead of what HYDRA might have.

"You can have whatever I have from the 'old country,' for all the good it will do you," he told Natasha. "The names I have of people who knew you or knew of you are many. The names I have of people who could answer your questions are few. The ones who are still alive, who were in a position to know anything back then and remember it now... Not everyone aged as well as we did."

Natasha gestured with a spoon. "Some of them did," she said. "The women. They were the ones who could use the Red Room's serum."

He nodded, acknowledging the point. "It may help with finding out when and why they wiped you, but I don't know how much it will help with your past. The only women in charge of anything back then were the matrons in the barracks and the nurses in the clinic."

Natasha shrugged and spooned some more rice on to her plate. "I'll take what I can get from whoever I can get it from."

There was no arguing that, so he didn't. "I'll draw up a list."

The list had to wait, however, for an appointment with the shrink, during which his reactions to both Natasha and the photograph of himself on the couch were discussed. Doctor Sahni's expression at seeing the couch -- and the fuzzy couch -- were a welcome and necessary breather in a hard afternoon of self-reflection. With Steve away, he could go directly back to the apartment without having to mind his manners and he did, but just to change into running gear and lope around Manhattan's periphery for a few hours.

When he got back and changed and fed, he remembered to turn his phone back on and saw a message from Steve, which turned out to be a picture of a quickly drawn sketch of Captain America setting fire to the fuzzy couch, a gas can at his feet. It was an old-style gas can from before, not the plastic things they had now, Bucky noticed when he'd stopped laughing.

 _What happened to respecting my agency?_ he texted Steve.

 _I'll respect it when it respects itself,_ came the reply a few minutes later. Then, a few minutes after that. _Who took the picture?_

It wasn't an idle question and Bucky took a few minutes to empty the sink into the dishwasher before answering. It wasn't a shameful answer, nor would it get him in trouble, but Steve knew as well as he did that Natasha had had little to do with him since he'd arrived. And there was the matter of Bucky still not having told Steve about Natasha's visit to Jackson Heights, which was nothing and not nothing in the same way. It wasn't as if he'd never kept secrets from Steve, then or now. But... but.

Steve didn't reply when he finally answered, at least not about that. (He had more to say about the fuzzy couch, however, and griped about spending too much time glad-handing field-grade officers.) But Bucky didn't think the topic was shelved completely, so when Steve brought it up the next day, after he'd gotten home and thrown his clothes into the washing machine, Bucky was more or less prepared.

"Maybe there's a pool about when I get my couch," he suggested. "And Natasha wanted to win."

Steve gave him a look that made it very clear he knew what Bucky was doing. "I know there's a pool. I've got my picks in. But her windows are either past or not yet close, so unless she told you to wait until March..."

Bucky stopped re-lacing his sneaker. "You're betting on me? The others, no surprise, but you? You dirty fink... If I help you out, do I get half the pot?"

"Not if you buy the fuzzy couch," Steve replied, going in to his bedroom and, from the sound of it, rummaging around on the shelves in his closet.

"I found your couch, by the way," Bucky called over. "And your water pitcher and the cabinet and half the stuff in here."

Steve came back out holding a package of sole inserts and tossed them at Bucky; they'd been promised from before the trip to NC.

"Look," Steve sighed, leaning on the back of the couch Bucky wasn't sitting on. "I'm not trying to be in your business and I'm not accusing you -- or Natasha -- of anything. She's my friend and I'm glad for her friendship and if she's decided to offer the same to you or you to her, I'll be glad for you both. But..."

But.

Bucky was more fond of than exasperated by Steve's fussing, but it was still awkward as hell all around, so he decided to end the misery. "You'll have to talk to her because it's her answer to give. But you can tell her that I'm okay with it."

Which didn't answer the question Steve was asking, even if it did answer the one he really wanted answered, which was that yes, Bucky was aware of what was going on and was a participant instead of a target.

"Did you get your tuxedo fitted yet?" Steve asked instead of pursuing the matter, for which they were both grateful, although Bucky would have preferred a different subject.

"I'm still not sure I'm going," he replied and Steve sighed, pushing off of the back of the couch.

"Everyone thinks you should go," Steve said, heading into the kitchen. "Your _shrink_ thinks you should go."

The Maria Stark Foundation was having a black tie fundraising gala and one of the attractions was going to be the attendance of all of the Avengers, who were in turn funded by the MSF. It was supposed to be a chance for the 'regular' people to see that the Avengers, out of costume, were 'regular' people, too. But with a $10,000 per plate admission -- and a $500,000 per table commitment if you wanted an Avenger to sit with you during dinner -- Bucky wasn't the only one wondering about what kind of regular people were involved on either end.

He had been invited without a cover charge, but he'd waffled on saying yes and then, having said yes, was still waffling on actually going. His primary objections had been his identity and then his ability to handle sustained social interaction.

"It's going to be a lot of work," he said. And it would, even with what had already been made possible through a group effort. "Even with the mask."

He'd been photographed with Steve and, in that context, it hadn't been too hard for the Page Six and TMZ folks to see the resemblance to WWII hero James Barnes. (Or for HYDRA to notice the resemblance to the Winter Soldier, even if they weren't necessarily in a position to do anything about it.) But even in a world with gods and super-soldiers, the most practical explanation was the easier to believe. And so it had quietly been disseminated by Hill and her flunkies that Steve Rogers had been seen with the grandson of a by-blow Sergeant Barnes had unknowingly fathered in France during his tenure with the Commandos. It was an effective cover, but Bucky still found it depressing as hell.

(He didn't think he had any actual descendants, although he'd certainly had means and opportunity back in the day. Now, of course, he wasn't in any shape to be a parent and he didn't even know if he could -- he was cynical enough to think Department X would have put him to stud if they'd thought they'd get anything super-powered out of it -- but he still liked the idea of a family and the cover, however rarely needed, felt disrespectful and hurtful to the man he'd once hoped he'd be.)

The good thing about New York was that celebrities were generally left alone and not treated like zoo animals unless they invited it the way Tony did, so between that and the fact that both he and Steve were always careful out in public, it hadn't ever become a big story. Parading around at a meet-and-greet where he could be photographed or looked at closely by people who could bring up his wikipedia page and see how much he looked like his purported ancestor... He hadn't been keen on it and neither had Hill and so he hadn't had to worry about going to the gala until Tony had reverse-engineered one of SHIELD's face masks and programmed it to look like a completely average 30-ish white male. Identity crisis solved.

"It'll be work you need to put in," Steve told him bluntly as he returned from the kitchen with a glass of water. "Outside of going to stores, you don't interact with anyone who doesn't know who you are and what your history is. You're going to be a hermit in Jackson Heights if you don't figure out how to carry on a regular conversation with someone who doesn't know your kill count."

Which was true and a mean thing to say and completely hypocritical coming from Steve, who admitted it when Bucky pointed it out.

"But if I've had to learn anything as Captain America, then or now, it's how to talk to people," Steve pressed on. "Just because I don't do it enough out of costume doesn't mean that I can't. I know I can. You _don't_ know. When you know, then you can go be a hermit by choice. At least until Sam shows up and decides you need to go out and 'meet people.'"

Bucky grinned because Sam had done that just last week. "You gave him wings, man. He is gonna be your wingman."

Which was what Sam had said and Steve had threatened to punt him out the window for saying. And looked like he might do the same to Bucky for repeating it.

"Go for your fitting," Steve told him with a sigh. "Go to the shindig, pretend to be a geologist or whatever you decide to say, and just… put everything aside for a night. It'll be there in the morning."

And so Bucky got his tuxedo, letting himself get talked into a patterned blue waistcoat instead of a cummerbund. On the night of the gala, he shined his shoes, covered up his arm with the sleeve, and put on the mask so that a stranger looked back in the mirror when he made sure his bowtie was straight. Steve startled a bit when he came out of his bedroom, then smiled and gave him a wolf-whistle.

"I don't think anyone but Tony knows what you look like," Steve mused as he put on his own jacket and waited for Bucky to nod that it was hanging properly. "And he might not remember. I'd tell you not to misuse that advantage, but I don't think I'm really that good a man."

The thought of messing with anyone hadn't crossed his mind, but now that Steve had not only introduced the idea, but also blessed it...

Bucky grinned and Steve grinned back. "At least your expressions are the same," Steve said, sounding relieved. "It's a little weird."

Bucky gave him a baleful look, knowing it would appear as just that. "And so finally, after seventy-two years, you have some tiny glimmer of understanding of how the rest of us felt when you showed up doubled in size."

Steve's grin turned abashed. "Okay, okay," he admitted. "You want to go first or should I?"

They couldn't arrive together, lest it draw attention to Bucky.

"You're the one whoring himself out by the minute," Bucky told him. "You go maximize your earning potential."

Bucky waited fifteen minutes, calming his nerves by watching half an episode of _The Simpsons_ before leaving the Tower through the secret entrance and coming back in the front door like any other guest.

The gala was as ridiculously fancy as had been promised and he was frozen for a long moment at the entrance to the hall where the cocktail reception part of the program was underway. With the floor filling with the well-heeled in fancy dress, their cufflinks and diamonds glittering as they raised champagne flutes and caviar toasts to their lips, he attracted little attention once he'd stepped out of the main walking path, just the mild curiosity of his unknown face and not the sustained attention the famous people who walked past him drew. He saw Steve, fancy beer glass in hand, looking apparently at ease and convivial as he stood surrounded by fancy-clad admirers. Thor's constellation was a little more awestruck and standing an extra few inches away from him, although he hardly looked like a force of legendary destruction done up in a penguin suit with a pocket square matching the dress of Jane Foster, standing at his side. The others were around, save for Clint, who was still doing whatever he was doing for Fury, and Tony, who was waiting for his dramatic entrance, but none of them had their own gravitational pull the way Steve and Thor did. He wasn't sure anyone knew Bruce was an Avenger anyway; he'd overheard at least one joke asking if the Hulk were invited and who'd pay to dine with him.

With a deep breath, he waded into the crowd, heading straight for the open bar and ordered a scotch, to which the reply was a request to choose between two single-malts and a high-end blended. He took his drink and tipped the barman and went to go look for canapés because you weren't being a wallflower if your mouth was full.

This wasn't his first fancy dress occasion, but the last one had been seventy years ago and he'd been in his olive drabs, tagging along with Steve at some party at Grosvenor Square. He'd felt like a fish out of water then, too, but he'd gotten by on his native charm and the respectful awe given him as the team sergeant of the Howling Commandos. He didn't have the latter anymore, not without a lot more explaining than anyone wanted to provide, and tonight was supposed to be a test to see if the former had been burned out of him like so much else.

His cover was that he was a vice president of an underwriting firm up in Stamford, which explained his disposable income and his lack of familiarity to New York society regulars. He was first pressed to use it as he waited to fill his little plate with dainties, offering to plate a few lobster tarts for a lady instead of handing over the serving piece. From there came introductions and, because the lady was not unaccompanied, an offer to join the circle her husband was standing in.

He'd initially balked at the cover because it would require learning about underwriting and there were going to be bankers and financial people up the wazoo in attendance, putting his knowledge and his lack of social connections to the test. He'd never been that kind of spy and he had no practice in it. But Hill had crafted a legend elegant in its simplicity and requiring only a moderate amount of homework and, like with the face mask, he'd found himself outmaneuvered. So James Tanner, formerly a risk management specialist for UBS and now a vice president of a new company specializing in foreign investment, stood eating his canapés and drinking his scotch and adding the occasional aside as professors and politicians and magnates (of an order or three smaller than Tony) discussed the events of the day. That his thorough familiarity with many unsavory parts of the world and the politics of almost anywhere was not from intense research but instead a brutal history of violence was remarkably easy to hide. His charm and social ease were a bit tougher to defrost, but context made it seem like polite reticence instead of having to wargame out every witty riposte before speaking it aloud. He took a break to replenish his plate and his scotch glass when he felt too uncomfortable, but allowed himself to be more fully drawn into the conversation when he returned.

Tony's grand entrance, Pepper on his arm like a queen, stopped all the chatter and Bucky was grateful for the extended pause to relax as Tony gave his spiel. Steve was good at the glad-handing and public speaking by dint of hard work and force of will, but Tony was glib by nature and, like every other photophilic creature, thrived in the spotlight. He was more at ease with it than Howard had been, more natural, because the line between Public Tony and Private Tony was pretty blurry. Howard had been more like Steve, a public persona and then the man he was when the spotlight was off. Which wasn't to say that Howard hadn't been a treat to watch, in no small part because there'd always been that little bit of desperation -- to please, to get people to forget that he was a Yid from the Lower East Side, to prove that he belonged -- that transformed into magnetism with any distance.

Tony was a pro and ended with a flourish to applause before accepting a flute of champagne and beginning his circuit around the room. Pepper had done the same from the other end, seamlessly and subtly, like a choreographed move. Bucky's group was closer to the side Tony was beginning from, so he appeared first, shaking hands and cracking jokes like a game show host. He caught Bucky's eye and winked before he shook his hand and moved on. Pepper, when she made her rounds, showed no recognition but was polite and grateful to everyone equally. He didn't have the heart to play with her ignorance.

Dinner was a greater and lesser challenge, a new set of people to socialize with, but the worst of the rust had already been knocked off. The tension between his shoulders was increasing, though, a weight pressing down that he couldn't offload. He'd had enough, he realized. He'd done the cocktail reception and he'd proven himself capable of making small talk, even if that small talk had been lying convincingly to others and not carrying on a regular, honest conversation as himself. He had passed the test Doctor Sahni (and Steve) had set for him, and he wanted to end the exercise. But he couldn't because they were still on the third course.

As soon as the majority of people had finished eating and started to circulate, Bucky lost himself in the crowd and disappeared, mumbling something about needing a cigarette. He went back the way he'd come, around the corner and down the block and into the nondescript entrance of a building with no number. Instead of going to Steve's apartment, he went up to the roof, peeling off the face mask as soon as JARVIS closed the elevator doors.

When he got up to the garden, he saw that he wasn't the only one with the same idea.

"You had enough, too?" Bruce asked wearily from a lounger by the railing. He was still in his tuxedo, hands folded in his lap as he lay there, a relaxed pose that did nothing to hide the tension in his body. Bucky wasn't scared of the Hulk, mostly because he had never seen him up close. He was only a little scared of Bruce, mostly because Bruce was the only one not scared of the Hulk who _had_ seen him up close. "It's a nice night. You can see a few stars, see how big it is out there."

Bucky took it as an invitation to approach the other lounger, which was near but not next to Bruce's. He sat down, then a moment later swiveled his legs up so that he, too, could lay back.

It was a companionable silence, two men who didn't mind company but had had quite enough of socializing. Bucky wasn't sleepy, but he did feel more relaxed with his eyes closed, listening to the muted din of Midtown far below and the closer hiss of the heating for the deck.

He didn't know how long he'd been there when he heard the quiet shush of the door opening once more and the clack of heels.

"The only two not on stage like circus performers and you're the first ones to punk out," Natasha accused, standing between the loungers with her hands her hips. She was wearing a slinky green number that managed to say a lot while only showing off a little.

"And you're the muscle sent to wrangle us back?" Bucky asked. Steve had probably noticed their absences, too, but there was no way he was slipping away long enough to do anything about it.

"Misery shared is misery lessened," she replied sweetly.

Bruce, eyes still closed, chuckled.

"I think you just wanted a chance to get away and will spend time 'convincing' us to come back before you return disappointed but in time for dessert," Bucky said.

Natasha shrugged daintily. "Are you really going to make me walk back there alone?"

This time, both Bucky and Bruce laughed out loud because if there was anything Natasha was at risk for, it was not being accosted on 42nd Street or being unescorted for a second longer than she wanted to be.

"I will settle for bringing one of you back, so draw straws or whatever it is you do," Natasha said and Bucky had to admire her cleverness. It made it much harder, if not impossible, for both of them to turn her down and all of them knew which one was going to have to capitulate. Bucky overcome in a crowd was not a hazard to person or property; Bruce hulking out was.

He looked over at Bruce, who gave him an apologetic grimace without a trace of smugness. Just because Bucky wasn't explosive didn't mean that Bruce didn't understand how unpleasant it could be for him. He gave Bruce a nod to indicate that it was okay.

"Is there going to be pie?" Bucky asked as he stood up, brushing himself off although he didn't know if he was making it better or worse. "I like pie."

Natasha was gracious in victory and didn't rub it in before she waved goodbye to Bruce and headed back to the elevator. In the better lighting of the elevator, Bucky could look himself over and he was maybe a little rumpled, but not so bad that he looked like he'd been doing anything too interesting.

"Why?" he asked. Nobody at the gala needed him to be present and if there was a reason for Bruce to be there, there was a better reason for him not to be if he wasn't feeling up to it. Natasha knew that, which made her play to bring him back -- and that's what it had been -- a mystery to him.

"You need the practice," she said simply. "Earlier was proof that you could survive the experience. Now you need to do it when you don't want to."

"I didn't want to do it earlier." Which wasn't really true and he thought she knew that. "I don't know what else I can get out of pretending to be someone else."

The elevator brought them back down to the nondescript lobby with its invisible layers of security. He gestured for her to precede him and she did so. He took a moment to put the mask back on and Natasha blinked at him in surprise when she saw, then smiled at herself for being surprised.

"It's not about the cover," she said once they were both outside again. Away from the heated roof deck, it was still winter and still cold and she shivered; he took off his tux jacket for her to wear for the block-plus walk and she accepted it gratefully. "It's about being in a crowded room and not spending all of your time doing threat assessment. It's about making polite conversation that doesn't really matter and learning what normal people consider unremarkable. It's about realizing that you can pass because, face mask or not, on the outside there's nothing about you that's different apart from the arm. It's about learning to fake it until you make it. Or until you remember it, as the case may be."

Bucky gave her a half-smile as acknowledgment, aware that she'd want nothing more. For all that they'd spoken of their pasts, together and apart, this was as personal a thing as she'd shared with him because this was _hers_. Her history as Natalia was still more or less the story of another woman, someone she didn't remember being, but this, this was what _Natasha_ had learned. And had chosen to share with him.

As they drew close to the front entrance, red carpeted and guarded by livery-clad security types and ringed by paparazzi with their flashbulbs, he waited for Natasha to hand his jacket back, but she didn't, wearing it like a trophy as she climbed the stairs. They drew attention, the Black Widow and the jacketless man trailing behind, and Bucky fought his instincts to duck or run. He knew the holographic sleeve hid his arm and his mask hid his features and Tony had assured him that there was something in the material that would make his face impossible to photograph, anonymous as it already was. ("It'll be like a lens flare, totally natural and sadly unfortunate to the photographer.") Which did nothing to ease his nerves or his fears and would not stop the gossip from following.

Natasha waited until they were outside the reception hall to hand over his jacket, arching her eyebrow in challenge when he gave her a sour look for making him run that gauntlet. "Time to level up, Luigi," she told him.

"You're the one apologizing to Hill when we're on the front page of the _Post_ tomorrow," he told her as he put his jacket back on.

He got back a careless shrug as she turned to return to the gala. He didn't know if she expected him to accompany her inside or not, but that would draw a little more attention than he was going to be comfortable with right now, so he waited a few beats, steeling himself for the wall of noise and people on the other side. It was actually not as bad the second time around, an initial shock like jumping in to cold water and then he remembered he could float okay. The tension that had driven him from the gala in the first place wasn't gone entirely, but now it felt like the second rep of a hard exercise and not the crushing weight from before. He sat with his coffee and dessert and listened to the conversation around him not as he had been doing, tactically in support of James Tanner's cover, but as an exercise in intelligence gathering for Bucky Barnes. These weren't average people, not dropping this kind of cash at a fundraiser, but they still talked about city services and their kids' education and how insurance rates had gone haywire since the Battle of New York and other things that near-strangers found commonality with. It was day-to-day life, whatever the income level, and for all that Bucky considered himself edging toward a normal life in Queens, he realized how divorced he still was from what qualified as such for anyone else.

The band at the far end of the hall had been making tune-up noises and now started to play, drawing attention and dancers. They were playing music he recognized in theme, if not actually the song in question - stuff from the 1940s, which he thought hadn't been any kind of accident, not with Captain America present. Or maybe this was still the kind of music played at shindigs like this. He wondered if whoever had chosen the band (probably not Tony, maybe Pepper) had hoped Steve would dance, in which case good luck to them. Steve held firm to the lie that he couldn't dance when the truth was that he was really just too self-conscious to dance well, something being Captain America had only made worse. They'd gone out before the war and then during and Bucky would happily remind Steve that the little guy had stepped on fewer toes. He had no idea how many toes he'd step on now, either, to be fair.

Nonetheless, he made his way toward the band, intent on at least listening and maybe getting a bit of a show as Steve avoided taking the floor with a succession of would-be partners. Tony, surprisingly, was already out there with Pepper, who'd ditched her shoes and moved with dignified grace to the beat. Other couples joined them and Bucky shifted over so he could still see the musicians.

"You look like I used to," Steve said by his side. "Plastered to the side watching the band play."

Bucky smiled without turning his head. "You come here with a spatula to scrape me off the wall?" It was what he used to say to Steve back then to get him to at least come out on to the floor with one of the girls who hadn't had a partner and wanted to dance.

"Nah," Steve replied, grinning because he remembered that, too. "I'm hoping to hide behind you so that nobody else comes looking."

A quick scan of the room showed more than a few hopefuls waiting for an opportunity. Like lions on the veldt waiting for their antelope.

"Good luck with that," Bucky told him cheerfully. "But I'm willing to make a distraction so you can flee at the first strains of 'Star Spangled Man.'"

Which they both knew was inevitable.

"You're a real pal," Steve said dryly. "I'm glad you came back, you know. I saw you go and you kinda looked done-for. But I'm glad you came back."

"What choice did I have?" Bucky snorted. "You sent the muscle after me. She plays dirty, too."

Steve gave him a confused look that melted into deep amusement. "I didn't send anyone, Buck."

Which was food for thought, if not to be consumed right now. He didn't know how much Steve knew, how much Natasha had told him when they'd spoken, just that they had. He and Steve hadn't really talked about it, Steve offering up only an assurance that Natasha was trying to be a good woman. Which could have meant anything from a blessing should he and Natasha decide to renew their relationship or an apology given in advance should Natasha wind up hurting him in the pursuit of her own past. Bucky thought the latter much more likely.

Whatever he might've said to Steve got lost when Hill sauntered up to them looking far more relaxed than he'd ever seen her. Not drunk, far from it, but like her first name was Maria instead of Agent. It was a good look on her. He spent more time with her than with almost anyone else and, despite the nature of their interactions, they'd progressed past interrogator and subject. But while Hill socialized with some of the other residents of the Tower and came to the occasional gathering, it was still sometimes hard for him to think of her as a person and not a professional.

"So there are some very serious stakes being raised on the matter of whether The Man with a Plan here can really dance," she told them with a twinkle in her eye that sparkled brighter as Steve groaned. "Now, most folks are trying to get him out on the floor to solve the question-"

"Maria," Steve sighed pitifully. "Please?"

"Shush, you," she told him firmly and turned to Bucky. "But I'm not most folk and I haven't been debriefing the foremost expert on Steve Rogers for the last couple of months without understanding how things work. So, _James Tanner_ , how bad is he really?"

Bucky smiled, as much for Steve's expression as for the question. "He can't slow-dance worth a lick," he answered with a smile at Steve's deepening glower. For all that he professed to not be able do something, Steve never took it well when that incapacity was confirmed by anyone else. "But he used to be able to handle the rest well enough once he stopped paying attention to who was watching him."

"Traitor," Steve grumped.

"Hrmm," Hill mused, visibly calculating the odds in her head.

" _Mister Tanner_ here was a great dancer," Steve piped up, wicked gleam in his eye. "Never had to sit down unless he wanted to. You should ask _him_ to dance."

Bucky thought Hill was going to ignore the comment or laugh it off, but she turned him and raised a speculative eyebrow. "You up to it?"

He honestly wasn't sure.

"Go on," Steve exhorted, but softly, not as a tease or a dare. "When was the last time you moved for the joy of it?"

He knew Steve didn't mean all of the Avengers competitions in the Tower gym, which were fun, but also conscious efforts to repurpose a weapon for more than just him.

"Come on," Hill said almost gently. "We can stop if we have to."

He gave her a searching look, saw nothing to be wary of beyond the actual circumstances, and nodded once. His shrink was always trying to get him to accept that he could trust people besides Steve with his care. Hill wasn't out to embarrass him and this wasn't, he didn't think, a test of anything but his own comfort level and dancing skill.

"Didn't even need a spatula," Steve said behind him as Bucky followed Hill toward the floor.

The band was just finishing a number as they found a place, but then they launched into what was definitely a close rendition of "Blues in the Groove" and Hill surprised him a little by being ready on the beat. He was off himself, then caught up and, once he had, spun Hill out a little, a move that surprised them both and she laughed with it. He was rusty, no doubt, but this wasn't Back Then and they weren't surrounded by couples who danced this way every night out and, by those standards, he didn't think anyone could tell. He rather thought they were among the best couples out there by the end of the song and, by mutual agreement, they stayed out for the next one. Hill was smiling, able to follow his dips and turns without faltering or grabbing at his arms for balance, and he was smiling back. It was fun, not for the nostalgia, not for any recuperative purpose, but for its own sake. He didn't have enough of that.

The band played one more swing tune before switching over to something slow, at which point he escorted Hill - Maria - to the sidelines and gave her a little bow.

"Not bad for having to work off seventy years of rust," she told him with a smile. "I'd take you to Grand Central on New Year's Eve."

He smiled in acknowledgment, not wanting to say that it hadn't been seventy years. Maria was off duty, but he didn't want to spoil things with a statement that would lead to a meaningful question.

Maria was off-duty for his interrogations, but not for all of her roles. Her cover as a Stark Industries employee meant that she was here to coax additional donations out of the high rollers, a task she'd jokingly admitted she took to heart because it increased her operating budget for the Avengers. Seeing someone she wanted to pump for money, she excused herself with a waggle of her eyebrows.

Alone again, Bucky looked around for Steve, who was not where he'd left him, which was hardly to be unexpected considering the occasion. He couldn't see where Steve had either gone or been dragged, but he did see Natasha, who'd maybe been watching him because she startled a little when he caught her eyes. He wondered if she'd seen him dancing and if she had, whether she remembered that she had been his last partner, out at a nightclub in Havana.

"Leveling up, Mario," he mouthed at her instead of wandering down that path of what-if.

Two weeks, a couple of trips to move things around in Jackson Heights, and a few poorly-chosen _Mario Kart_ opponents later, Bucky found himself riding shotgun as Clint drove them out to Jersey.

(There was no version of the super-soldier serum that compensated for the fact that he and Steve hadn't grown up with video games and didn't play them often enough to become any good. Their persistent incompetence despite enhanced reflexes made them targets, especially when even Pepper could beat either of them easily at the combat games.)

Clint had returned from Fury's errand two days after the gala, although nobody but Natasha had seen him for the better part of a week after that. Whatever it had been had been ugly, Bucky gathered, and Steve had only known the roughest shape of it, not any kind of detail. He might know more when he got back from his latest trip, however, which was down to Atlanta with Natasha to meet with Fury himself. Fury had been hard to track down since the Poland fiasco the other month, not returning messages and then refusing to come back to the US, let alone New York. The Avengers as a group were annoyed, even Maria had stopped defending his actions, and the Atlanta meeting was perhaps closer to a last-ditch attempt at salvaging the relationship than either side wanted to admit.

But for Bucky, that was a situation above his paygrade and little of his concern beyond how it affected Steve. He wasn't an Avenger, which might have been why Clint had sought him out and asked if he felt like going shooting -- little chance of shop talk. Not much talk at all, really, and Bucky didn't think Clint minded any more than he did.

They were headed out to a range near the Delaware Water Gap, a private 'club' catering to distance weapons that was patronized almost exclusively by folks on the government rolls -- military snipers, other assorted agencies' direct action types, and folks like Clint who'd been both by intent, and Bucky, who'd been both by conscription. He'd been out there once before with Clint, early after he'd come in from the cold, and then it had been a test. Now, however, it was just to refresh perishable skills and blow off some steam. The Tower had a fancy range, of course, but it had no way to set targets hundreds of meters away and neither he nor Clint wanted to use the virtual-reality setup. So it was off to Jersey they went.

Shooting at a range could be a social activity, but shooting for distance, especially outdoors in subfreezing weather, was a solitary sport. They had gone together to shoot; they hadn't gone to shoot together. Which didn't mean that there wouldn't be some scorekeeping done at the end, just that Bucky didn't expect to see too much of Clint before then.

Sniping, unlike most of what was in his skill set these days, didn't bother him overmuch. It was restful, actually, peaceful and requiring so much calm inside his head. It was also nothing he'd learned as the Winter Soldier, which sometimes mattered a lot. He was still mostly unappreciative of how dark his Army and Commando days had been and how much they'd changed him, but they weren't as tainted as what had come after and lying on the rubberized mat and setting up his rifle to account for wind and distance, he didn't feel dirty practicing what he'd learned then.

He caught up with Clint at lunch, during which they compared scores and shooting conditions at the various targets. (Clint was the better marksman at distance, no question, although Bucky was no slouch.) Clint had brought his bow and quiver as well and planned to spend the afternoon shooting arrows; his anticipation of that brought the first genuine smile Bucky had seen from him all day. Bucky had brought two rifles, his own and then a new one he was considering switching to because it folded smaller and lighter and he was going to try it out after lunch. Clint knew a lot about rifles, had fired practically every sniper variant of every major maker, and spoke intelligently on the subject. He, personally, didn't see the point of moving away from the one Bucky had been using, but agreed that for someone who multi-tasked as much as Bucky did in the field, portability was a greater consideration than for someone whose primary job was to shoot things from a distance.

(The new rifle was worth considering, but only if he found a good armorer to make some heavy modifications. Clint probably knew a few local guys who could do the work.)

The drive back to the Tower picked up their earlier conversation, but with more data on the rifles -- Clint had an armorer in mind -- and one notable difference.

"What's up with you and Natasha?" Clint asked casually, eyes on the semi bearing down on them to their left.

There were many ways to answer the question and just as many to avoid it, but Bucky decided to do neither. Clint's relationship with Natasha was unique and longstanding and he didn't know if it was more like his and Steve's, which was what he suspected, or if there was a romantic component as well. It was none of his business either way, but he had no idea what Natasha had told Clint or not and didn't want to give away more than she was willing to on her own.

"Our incredibly fucked-up pasts," he said. Which seemed to satisfy Clint, as he nodded and said nothing more.

With Steve not due back for another day, Bucky packed up some things and headed for Jackson Heights. He'd been doing that on-and-off, just a night here or there, a combination of getting used to being on his own and weaning Steve off of a roommate. Even without much of a living room, his apartment was livable; his bedroom and kitchen and bathroom and dining room were functional, if spare. He kept food in the fridge and cabinets now and, having bought more pots, could cook something more complicated than toast. He had internet and Netflix and bookcases full of books because early on he and Steve had made a habit of going to the used bookstores and the bouquinistes and picking out cheap paperbacks and not-so-cheap hardbacks and he'd been bringing some over to the apartment on every trip. His hermitage, as almost everyone had taken to calling it, was actually pretty comfortable.

He slept late and headed back to the Tower after breakfast to have a short session with Hill, who mostly wanted to know about a trio of missions he'd completed for Pierce in 1995. They were done in less than two hours and she finished the session by handing him a flyer for a dance club in Brooklyn.

"It's all retro stuff - lindy, foxtrot, shag," she explained. "It's mostly hipsters doing it to be quaint, but there's a healthy representation of folks who aren't being ironic. It's a good time and you don't need to bring a partner to dance."

Bucky could only cock an eyebrow, surprised by the gesture and that such a place existed in 2015 and at that address, which had probably been a brewery when he'd been living in Brooklyn.

"Without flattering myself in the slightest," Hill went on with a self-deprecating shrug, "you seemed like you were having a good time dancing at the fundraiser. There's no reason you have to wait until the next one to be a jitterbug again."

"Hunh," he chuffed out, mostly to make some kind of acknowledgment. "You've been?"

Hill smiled and nodded. "I've been. The booze is pretentious and overpriced, but there's a dive down the block that's fine. And to answer the question that's on your face, my mother was a dance teacher, so I can tell my West Coast Swing from my East Coast."

When he'd thought about it, he'd assumed that Hill had needed to learn how to dance for a mission or something crazy like that because everything about anyone related to the Avengers was always crazy like that. But it was actually nice that she'd come by it naturally.

"Thanks," he said, folding the flyer in thirds. "Maybe I'll try it."

And the funny thing was, he wasn't saying it to say it. It would take some working-up of courage, but it was more appealing than most of what everyone else had helpfully suggested to him as a way to 'get out and meet people.'

"Do," Hill exhorted, shuffling the papers in her folder so that it would close. "You deserve to be happy, Barnes."

Bucky stood up to go. "Some days, maybe."

Steve and Natasha were back by the time he got upstairs, or at least Steve was, banging around in his bedroom when Bucky came into the living room.

"How did it go?" Bucky called as he went into the kitchen to see what was available for lunch. He should have half the tuna salad he'd made yesterday, but Steve might've eaten it already.

The sound of something heavy dropping and then Steve shouting "Fuck!" was the only answer.

There was still tuna salad, so Bucky got the rye bread out of the freezer and put four slices into the toaster.

He was slicing tomato and lettuce when Steve finally emerged, hair still damp and at all angles and wearing jeans and a t-shirt with a koala with a machine gun on it.

"It went badly," Steve said as he came into the kitchen and leaned against the counter. "Fury was defensive, then indignant, then defensive again. Natasha was on the attack the entire time. I was in the middle, being told by both parties to sit down and shut up because I wasn't a spy and didn't understand the situation."

Bucky gestured for Steve to get down a couple of plates from the cabinet, which he did.

"He's keeping secrets for the sake of keeping secrets because it's all he knows to do," Steve went on, frustration seeping from every pore. "But he's setting us up to get screwed up the same way HYDRA screwed us up by compartmentalizing everything so far down that we can't see the danger. And he won't be budged. I'm an espionage toddler, so my opinion doesn't count. But Natasha's just pissed at him and she _sounds_ pissed at him, so he's taking that as permission to treat her arguments as acting out of hurt feelings instead of thoughtful criticism by someone who has apparently been at this longer than he has."

Which, Bucky supposed, answered at least part of the question about how much Natasha had told Steve. He went to the fridge to get the block of chipotle gouda, stopping off at the drawer with the cheese slicer on his way back.

"We need his intel and we need his experience and we need his guidance because, God knows, we're not tight enough to work as an independent unit yet," Steve sighed, "but he's putting us at so much risk. If you hadn't been with us in Poland, we'd all be dead and do you know what his response was? 'That's why he was there.' What does that even mean? 'The Lord will provide' covers manna, not manpower."

Bucky handed the cheese and slicer to Steve, who sheered off thin slabs and placed them on the tuna-laden toast so that Bucky could put everything back into the toaster.

"At least he's happy that I'm going out with you guys?" he offered with enough sarcasm for Steve to hear. Fury had been quick to offer assistance when Bucky had first come in out of the cold, but he'd been anything but supportive of the Winter Soldier taking the field with the Avengers.

"Yeah, Natasha had a few things to say about that," Steve chuckled darkly. "I think she wanted to ask him what he knew about her, whether he knew more than she did when he first brought her in, but she didn't. I don't know if it's because she's afraid he'll say yes or if she'll be disappointed if he says no."

Which was interesting, but not so interesting that he felt like pursuing it.

After lunch, during which Steve got a text from someone that just made him sigh with frustration, Bucky had an idea.

"So, you wanna go see my couch?"

Steve froze where he was and turned around slowly. "Please tell me that you didn't buy the fuzzy couch."

Bucky glared at him.

"I haven't bought a couch yet," he said primly. "But I may buy the fuzzy couch just because you hate it so much."

Steve looked at him suspiciously, like he was sure there was something going on and he had to figure it out before it came back to bite him. He had been giving Bucky that look since 1925 and Bucky gave him the same response he had back in '25: he stuck out his tongue.

Steve laughed, which had been the point.

"Come on," Bucky exhorted. "You can beat the crap out of a heavy bag later."

An hour later, they were walking in to Ligne Roset. The fuzzy couch was en route to the shar-pei couch, so Bucky got to watch Steve gawp and then make worried noises as they approached, then sigh dramatically in relief as they went past it.

"It's even worse in person," Steve muttered in not-entirely-feigned horror, then stopped short after they turned the corner created by an armoire display. "Oh, no."

"Oh, yes," Bucky insisted cheerfully, going over the electric lime-green shar-pei couch and sitting with his arms spread in welcome. "Come sit down."

Steve made like he was blinded by the color and stumbled over clumsily before dropping down. "Hunh," he said once he was settled. "This is actually pretty comfortable."

"Yeah," Bucky agreed. He hadn't actually decided on buying the couch when he'd suggested they come down here, but now that he was here, now that Steve was here, he was seriously considering it. He'd kept the picture Natasha had taken, had moved it out of the furniture folder even, and while he knew that the couch wasn't the reason he kept that photo, it wasn't completely incidental, either.

Next to him, Steve chuckled.

"What?"

Steve shook his head, running his hand over the soft, wrinkled material. "Just thinking about the men we were supposed to be," he admitted with a shrug.

And the thing of it was, Bucky could follow that train of thought. If they'd been the men they should have been, the ones who came home from the war, they'd have settled down eventually - Steve first, most likely, with Peggy - and couch-shopping would have been a very different experience. He and the future Missus James Barnes, whoever she might have been, would have picked something proper and restrained, something they could sit their parents and guests on without so much as a raised eyebrow. They wouldn't have picked something that made them laugh, nothing that could be turned into a metaphor or a conversation piece. There'd have been no need for threats to set anything aflame.

"I think we should take a picture of you on the fuzzy couch and you bring it down to DC and show Peggy," Bucky said, which made Steve smile and he could see a little bit of gratitude there along with the sadness. "So what do you think?"

Steve leaned back, still rubbing his hands on the couch. "Does it make you happy?"

Seeing the photo of himself in the couch made him happy, but that wasn't the same question. Or maybe it was. "Yeah."

Steve smiled at him. "Then there you go," he said, then frowned. "But please, for the love of all that's holy, not this color."

With Steve providing commentary that would have shocked anyone who'd realized that the man comparing a cloth swatch to diarrhea was Captain America, Bucky became the proud future owner of a royal blue shar-pei sectional, to be delivered in three weeks' time.

The news that Bucky had finally bought a couch was apparently worth a dinner party for the Avengers at Tony and Pepper's place, during which everyone but Natasha demanded photos that Bucky, at Steve's prompting, refused to provide.

"You need to experience it firsthand," Steve assured, which of course piqued everyone's interest. And became the starting point of planning Bucky's housewarming party, which he didn't think he was ready for but also knew that he had little chance of stopping once everyone pulled out their phones to check their calendars. (Thor's schedule, it turned out, was the hardest to accommodate.) But first everyone had to survive tonight's dinner party, which had seemed like a given before one of Tony's drones went live down in the workroom and flew straight into the smoke detector, setting it off.

Pepper sent him an email the next day to remind him that everyone inviting themselves over did not mean that he had to let them in or provide refreshment and, if he chose to, to please let her do something on that front because this should be a happy occasion and not a stressful one.

He was at Patel Brothers stocking up on frozen samosas and chutneys to go along with the momos when Natasha called and asked if he were up to a visitor. He was already back at the apartment and had made tea by the time she turned up with a pair of black-and-white cookies. "I was on the Upper East Side," she explained. "Glaser's is on Steve's list of approved bakeries for 'proper' New York delicacies."

The inflection she'd put on the words clearly expressed what she thought of that idea, but Bucky shrugged. "You're complaining to the wrong office here."

There was a lot of bad babka and disappointing rugelach floating around New York City in the future-present and he and Steve might have spent some time finding places that didn't depress them. But if she wanted to blame Steve, she could.

The couch had been delivered on Monday and Natasha stuck her head in the living room to see it in situ, nodding thoughtfully at the color and its placement. She didn't even pretend to be surprised which one he'd chosen and laughed when he asked if she wanted a commission.

"I'll take it in kind in a little bit," she told him and he understood.

They had their cookies and tea and he waited for whatever she wanted to ask him without too much apprehension. It was still a little weird and uncomfortable to have her come to him about their shared past, but it didn't hurt anymore. It wasn't her only reason for talking to him now, which helped, and he'd gotten a little more familiar with who she was now and how Natasha operated as opposed to Natalia. Natasha now was much more protective of herself, her reserve serving as armor instead of the cold indifference she'd displayed after the Red Room had gotten their star pupil back. It was why she continued to hide their past, even though Steve and Clint now knew, meeting him not only in private, but also away from where any of the others could come across them. He could wish she'd share more with him, but the fact of it was that he already saw more of her than most of the others and she'd 'known' them far longer.

"I have two lists of people who might know about my life," she told him, breaking off a bit of the chocolate side of her cookie half; they'd split one because of the size. "The people who most likely know when I was wiped again and why, and then your list. Out of the first group, I have about a dozen names -- it had to have been in the last few years before I left Russia and I know who was pulling the strings there. Out of the list you gave me, the women who were around back then, I have found three of them so far who are in any shape to help me now."

One had been a permanent instructor at the Red Room's academy, another had been a liaison between the Red Room and the 'regular' KGB, and the last was another Black Widow who'd been a few years ahead of Natalia in the program. He'd taught alongside the first, been tasked by the second, and the third he'd worked with a few times over the decades.

"I don't know whether I should be surprised or not that there are so few of us from those early days left," Natasha admitted. "It was so long ago, and yet here I am. Did the others die in the line of duty? Were they allowed to retire and live out their natural lives? Were they purged along with the others every time someone at the Kremlin got paranoid?"

Bucky shrugged. "All of the above?" he offered, thinking back to those years. "The purges were pretty bad. A few times, I'd come out of the tank after a couple of years and there wouldn't be anyone from the last time, everyone had either been packed off to the gulag or shot up against the wall. But it was also high risk work and the longer you did it, the greater the odds that you wouldn't survive the next mission. That's why they put me on ice."

They hadn't been disposable, not with all of the time and effort put into their training. They hadn't been cannon fodder the way HYDRA churned through people. But they'd certainly been expendable, currency to be spent to advance the Soviet cause. At least the others, less so him, a precious killing machine whose value was immeasurable, at least until someone could reproduce the serum.

Natasha nodded, understanding even if not in a visceral, lived-through-that sense, then tilted her head. "Did I know Lyudmilla Kuznetsova at all, or were we just fellow soldiers?"

"She was jealous of you," Bucky answered with a dark laugh. "She was from one of the first classes, old enough to have been active during the war. She had been the first to be sent to America, I think, and she'd been enjoying being the star until you outshone her. There was a rivalry, but you seemed to enjoy it because you never lost. I used to suspect her of being behind us getting caught in Cuba because one of her allies testified against us, but it stopped mattering, so I never knew for sure. She didn't like me much even before you and I got together."

They'd worked together twice after Natalia had been taken from him; the first time Mila mentioned it, he'd pulled a knife on her and assured her that their bosses would believe him if he told them she'd died honorably in the service of the Soviet people. The second time, they didn't speak a single unnecessary word between them.

Something must have shown on his face because Natasha laughed and smiled almost fondly at him. "I'm going to take that as you not having any strong objections if coercive measures need to be taken."

The tiny part of him that was still Brooklyn's Own Bucky Barnes had very strong objections to using violence on old ladies. But the rest of him had gone to war and seen old ladies who'd sold out their Resistance or Jewish neighbors for cash or out of spite because someone hadn't given them a chicken egg ten years ago. And then all of him had become the Winter Soldier, who'd killed old ladies without any hesitation at all.

"I haven't been an altar boy since 1930," he replied with a shrug.

Apart and distinct from the whyfores of his ownership of the Winter Soldier's deeds, he'd come to accept that he was not a very good man, not the way Steve still was, not the way rest of the Avengers were. It hurt Steve when he expressed the sentiment, actually hurt him, and so Bucky didn't in his earshot. But it didn't make it less true. He'd been changed too much by his experiences, not warped by them but simply made different and being in full possession of his own mind again had only made that more clear. He'd seen too much of the darkness in the world outside of war, all of the ways, great and small, people could be casually cruel and indifferently evil. He'd come to understand, even when there was so much else about the world and himself that he didn't understand, that most of the harm in this world ultimately wasn't caused by people who were simply misguided or hadn't been given all of the love and opportunity they had deserved; they were just _bad people_ and there wasn't redemption from that, there wasn't a cure. Except the kind that people like him -- and Natasha -- offered.

"Will you come with me?"

He startled at the question and she smiled wryly at him. There were better choices -- Clint, whom she trusted more and had worked more closely with; Steve, even, whose chivalry wasn't nearly as spotlessly clean as history had polished it.

"They wiped me out of fear," she told him. "And so fear is what I must use in return. And nothing will scare them more than to have you by my side."

Any warm feeling that she'd been asking out of burgeoning friendship or out of respect for their past or anything other than that she wanted the Winter Soldier to do what he was best at died in his heart and he forced himself not to show his disappointment or any sense of betrayal. Because this wasn't _just_ about him being the Winter Soldier, this was about him being the Winter Soldier who'd been in love with Natalia Romanova and all of the banked rage and pain that came with that. The Winter Soldier turning against his old masters was bad enough, but a Winter Soldier bent on revenge for what had been taken from him, Natalia at his side... she was right. Nothing would scare them more. And nothing would make him hurt more than to turn the most precious part of himself into a blunt weapon to be used.

He got up off the stool he'd been sitting on and went to the other end of the kitchen, by the window. There wasn't much of a view from the kitchen, just the backs of the buildings around the corner, not even the private courtyard that could be seen from the bedroom and living room. He heard her approach, but didn't turn around until she put her hand on his arm.

He could see on her face that she'd realized she'd hurt him, but that wasn't enough right now.

"I need you to protect me," she said softly, entreaty in her voice.

He made a noise to scoff at that notion, but she shook her head. "Not from the physical threats, although I'm sure you'd fill that role just fine. I need you to protect me from their lies."

He chuffed out a humorless laugh. "I'm not sure I can."

He remembered his life from back then, but he'd still been in and out of stasis and he'd missed years at a time, getting filled in only as gossip, context provided by third-hand biased sources, and what he hadn't known dwarfed what he had.

"You remember _something_ ," she told him sourly. "I remember _nothing_. They took everything away. My name, my family, my past, my _self_. You. And then they did it again and I don't even know why. I've been made and remade before I ever had a chance to build my own foundations and I _know_ how rickety they are. There is nothing to hold them up because it was all taken from me, time and time again."

She was almost shaking with anger, but he didn't offer her succor, still feeling his own wounds. She had his empathy because he'd felt that same rage. She had his sympathy because he'd had what to fall back on, the aborted life of Bucky Barnes, while she had nothing. But at this very moment, he felt too heartsick to offer her anything more.

"I can't do this alone," she said after a long moment when they both looked out the window. Across the way, someone in an apartment a floor above them had opened the window and was shaking out a tablecloth, bright red and gold against the muted brick. "I wish I could, but I can't. I'd be going in blind and they'd destroy me. You're the only person I trust who can help me. You may not have been awake for everything, but you were awake for enough and you know how they operate."

The casual confirmation of trust surprised him and he looked down at her. She cocked an eyebrow, a challenge and a sarcastic retort in one gesture.

He wondered if she was playing him -- she'd know how to manipulate him -- and he wondered if he cared. There would always be a part of him who would always want to do whatever Natalia asked of him. But the rest of him was free of strings and tethers and that part, that part was wondering how could he not pay Steve's gift forward and make himself vulnerable to set someone he loved free.

"You don't have to give me an answer now," she said, stepping back and away from him and the window. "I know what I'm asking of you. Or close enough. I've never asked someone to do something painful out of respect for love before."

He laughed bitterly, remembering standing under guard and watching her get strapped down to the table.

"Yes, you have. And I did it then, too."

It took her a beat to understand what he'd said. She smiled, not happily, but not like she'd won a victory, either. And then she stepped back to him and kissed his cheek.

"You're a better man than you think you are, James Barnes," she said softly. "And I'm glad, if I only get to remember one thing, that it's you."

And then she left.

He was still at the window when his phone rang, the liquor store Pepper had ordered from was outside with the delivery.


End file.
